Emily's Notebooks: The Christmas Revolution
by Alsike
Summary: In a different world, Erik Magnus overthrew the US government when Emily Prentiss was only twelve years old. On that day the course of her life changed irrevocably. This is her story.
1. Chapter 1

1

They called it the Christmas Revolution, eventually, after the dead had been buried and the grass had grown back over the blasted earth, the day the Rasputins came to power. They brought true unity to the Soviet States, and true revolution.

My mother and I were in the Ukraine at the time. She had come as an Ambassador from the United States, and when the United States fell to Erik Magnus, we stayed as refugees. The USSR was one of the few places where the Empire of Mutants had not yet taken hold. Although only as guests in a harsh land with few comforts, we lived free of the purges and the slavers for longer than most.

That Christmas we had been given a pound of lentils by kind neighbors, and my mother had managed some semblance of the traditional Ukrainian soup. It was better food than we had had for a few months. My mother had always complained about the poor supplies available in the Soviet States, with its disinterest in trade with more developed countries, but it had only gotten worse as the Soviet Union became the last bastion of human rule. Other countries, weaker and less stubborn, had fallen under the demands of the Empire, attacked on two fronts, by foreign forces and internal terrorists with unimagined powers. Winters in the Ukraine were always hard, but without any international trade and terrorists disrupting food transport and grain stores, we had gone without more nights than we had eaten.

In some ways it was a relief when the raiders came. There was no more waiting. The black hole we had dreaded for so long was finally swallowing us up.

We heard the screams from the village long before they reached our house. My mother had time to load the shotgun she had kept and religiously cleaned for just such an eventuality. I didn't know why. I stilled her hand from its furious polishing and asked her what hope she had in fighting. She had told me I would never understand. I had spent too much of my life in the USSR, and could whistle the Internationale more readily than the Star Spangled Banner. There was nothing worth more to her than freedom.

I didn't understand. I was only fifteen then, but even now her reasoning seems flawed. What is freedom but the chance to begin anew? And what beginnings are there in death?

When the door burst open she let off a shot, again and again, into the leading man's chest. A torch of flame shot out from the man behind him and enveloped her. I saw her body aflame, blackened and scorched as she still moved and thrashed, trying to fire the twisted hunk of metal one more time.

"Come out with your hands bare if you want to live," they shouted, first in Russian and then in Ukrainian. I obeyed, scarcely able to do otherwise as my mother's body still twitched and glowed with heat. They stripped me, checking for explosives, then bound me and threw me into the caravan with the other humans who had been too afraid or too weak to die.

We spent weeks in that caravan, living like dogs, and then were shipped on trains to the old Gulags, now cleared of prisoners, the humans thrown in with the rest of us, and the mutants set free.

We mixed with humans from other areas, and that was where I heard of the rise of the Rasputins: Mikhail, Piotr, and Illyana, and their domination of Leningrad and finally Moscow. The Kremlin had fallen to the Mutant Empire, and now there was no land on earth where humans were anything but slaves.

At the Gulag they sorted us into classes. Those of us with skills or other desirable qualities would be sent back to the cities for distribution among the mutant populace, and those without would labor in the camps for the good of the Empire.

I could speak English and some Arabic, which gave me some rank, but my Ukrainian was better than my Russian, which marked me out as provincial. I was also young, female, and had survived the trip a virgin, which few managed, so eventually they decided that I would be sent to the Kremlin for personal service to the Rasputins.

I was not as much of a virgin as reputed. I had had a girlfriend in the small town we had moved to when we left Kiev, although we had barely done more than kiss. And in the Gulag I had shared a few rough blankets with a woman from Moscow who said her name was Irina and little else. She had picked me out of the crowd of rural Ukrainian peasants, thrown me her bedroll and told me to follow her. She touched me at night, but never looked at me while doing it, and never went too far. She gave me advice that my mother would have considered treasonous, and taught me to move silently so as not to get noticed by the more brutal guards. But she would never tell me what she had done before the revolution.

Quite quickly she became invaluable to the guards as a spy amongst the humans, keeping an eye out for plots. I asked her why she would betray us like that. She laughed at me and told me that letting them shoot the ringleaders would save us all from being shot like eels in a tank, ready to be eaten.

I didn't want to be like her, naming the names that sent others to their deaths. I wonder if that was the potential she saw in me however, that caused her to pick me out of the groups to warm her bed. I was grateful to her though, she made sure I had enough to eat, and we both kept each other from freezing those first months of the cold new year.

Some weren't so lucky. Diseases ran rampant in those close quarters, and it was far too cold in the poorly insulated buildings. It was the children who were dying, in shivering emaciated bundles, their parents sometimes lost or sometimes just incapable of providing aid. It was so hard to watch, but there was nothing I could do, and nothing Irina would do.

She had a little girl once, she told me. But she didn't say what had happened to her, and I could not bring myself to ask.

When I arrived in Moscow it turned out that eager officials had sent far too many slaves to the Kremlin and we were all kept in the old stables until something could be done with us. The ones with practical skills were put to work, but the rest waited. I waited.

It was Illyana who saw us all, stuck with the boring clerical labor while her brothers got to enjoy themselves with politics and military actions. I was the only one who saw the irritation and exhaustion on her face though. Everyone else just burned with anger. Their words about raping and murdering her if they got the chance were far uglier than her dry questions about our abilities and our futures.

All she did was look at me, gave one spare glance to my credentials (noting I hadn't even finished high-school and had no practical skills at all) and marked me down as a breeder/concubine. It was the best thing she could have done. Piotr was more interested in the strapping young men from the farms, and Mikhail sought out slender, full-breasted blonde women who looked unnervingly like his sister. I was left alone and worked cleaning the stables for the next two years, as other, more attractive, women were sold out from alongside me, to wealthy Russian mutants or foreign slave traders. No one was interested in a skinny young breeder with a strange unpretty face. And Irina's lessons about fading into the background, going unnoticed, and staying out of trouble had served me well.

Then the man came. He wasn't looking for a breeder. He was looking for me in particular, a Prentiss, he said. He had known my mother before the revolution. But he was a mutant, rather well situated in the regime that ran what was formerly known as the United States.

His daughter was moving to Genosha, and he bought me as a present for her. He explained to me that my purpose was to please her, and to keep my ears open, inform him of anything I may have learned about her business when he made contact with me. He repulsed me, and I wondered what sort of loyalty he expected of a slave he had just bought to give away.

Winston Frost was a handsome man, but there was an ugly brutality in his eyes, and for a long time I wondered whether he would try me out himself before passing me on to his daughter. But he wore an odd expression when he looked at me, and I wondered if he were seeing me at all. It was not a comfortable thought to wonder whether he had been with my mother before the Revolution. In the end he only felt my breasts as if testing for ripeness, and had me branded.

The Americans liked to tattoo their slaves, a small symbol on the right shoulder blade, but in Russia we were more old-fashioned. I already had a stumpy K indicating that I was a Kremlin slave. The hot metal pressing into my flesh and leaving a raised shiny pink burn was not something I ever wanted to experience again, but Baron Frost had no time to take me back to the Americas with him, so he had the blacksmith prepare an odd, stylized F.

It was worse the second time, because I knew what to expect. The mark hurt for days afterward. I could not sleep on my back, and when we left for Africa it was no longer easy to pack the wound with snow until the pain numbed itself.

Genosha, an island off the east coast of Africa, barely a quarter of the size of Madagascar, was the home of the main court of the Mutant Empire. Erik Magnus lived there, in a palace in the lush mountains. So did all who desperately wanted to be important. Those who were important in their homelands all had houses in Hammer Bay where they would come when decisions were to be made or special appointments handed out.

Baron Frost brought me from the hotel to a tall glistening white building on the outskirts of the city. He had told me to bathe and dress in the clean clothes he had brought. They were scarcely anything, just a black strapless dress that covered me from breast to hip and sandals. For the first time I truly felt aware of my status as a concubine. I had always been vulnerable and aware of that, but I had never really understood that it was my purpose to be used. There was always a faint suggestion that I needed to save myself and my reputation for someone, for my final owner. But now I would have an owner, and there was no reason I could muster to deny her. I was a body, a possession. I stood in front of the mirror in the hotel until the Baron yelled at me looking at myself. I wondered if she would want me. I was skinny and ugly, burned and scarred. I had forgotten so much of my English that I sounded like an imbecile when I spoke. I seemed to be an absurdly worthless gift.

It only made sense when I discovered I had been bought as an insult.

"Emma, darling," the Baron said, entering the room, and gesturing for me to kneel by the wall. He gave the girl a kiss that was received stiffly and then moved away, and I was given my first sight of my new mistress.

She was young, it was clear, and bony, with skinny arms like mine. Her hair was short and blonde, browner at the roots, and chopped off bluntly at her chin. There was a knot and twist in her nose as if it had been broken and not healed properly, and the way she moved to keep a distance between herself and her father made me wonder if he was the one who had done it.

I was brought to her, eyes down, pushed to my knees, and I barely got a glimpse of her reaction to me, but there was a clear flash of discomfort, a vulnerability in her eyes. It hardened quickly and she looked to her father with disdain. "Why would I want this?" she asked, and I thought I might be more than a spy. I was meant to be a sign of her father's power over her, the knowledge he held that she did not wish anyone else to know. But I wondered if he had miscalculated, because save for the first glance, she didn't even look at me.

I was wrong. A few minutes later, when her father was expounding on an uninteresting proposal that was doing the rounds at court, she looked back. I met her glance, accidentally, and she flinched away.

She may have been a mutant, I thought, but she was just a girl, hardly more than a child, and younger than me. I couldn't be afraid of her. Even when I felt the first brush against my mind, feather light, I still had no reason to fear her or hate her.

I was given quarters downstairs with the other house slaves. Although our mistress lived alone, she was well positioned enough to often be entertaining other members of the court, and the amount of servants she kept was in proportion to that. Her body of servants was not only made up of human slaves. She also employed lower status mutants for more public or sensitive duties.

From the moment I stepped into the slave quarters it was clear that the rumor mill there ran incredibly quickly. They greeted me as 'new girl' but behind my back called me the Commie Whore. They didn't even ask my name, but they knew that I was classed as a concubine and treated me as if it were an integral part of my character.

I hadn't spoken English for two years, not since my mother died, and only with her for many years before that. They laughed at me for my difficulty with it. Only Jennifer, a twelve-year-old bath attendant, spoke to me as if I could understand her. She was also the only one who asked me if I was actually Russian. There was a little thrill of terror in her tone of voice as she asked, and she was utterly shocked when I said that I was American, but had lived in the Soviet Union for eight years. Then she asked if I were a communist traitor, and I wondered if this really was the attitude American children were raised with, even after the revolution. JJ must have been only eight when the United States fell to Erik Magnus, and yet she had been carefully indoctrinated in Cold War ideology. I impulsively asked where her parents were, wondering what they were like, before considering how awful the answer could be.

She said her father was fighting in the war. I couldn't find a way to tell her that the war was over, and we had lost. But her opinions were more understandable knowing she had come from a military family. She said her mother, her brother and two sisters were still in America, but she hadn't seen them since she was eight and they disappeared out of her house one night. She had been having nightmares about her father in the war and had gone to sleep with the family dog. When she awoke, the house was empty.

A lot of her neighbors had disappeared too, but she had found a soldier who had brought her to a group house in New England with lots of other kids. She explained it as if it had been a lot of fun, but it was clear it had been some sort of brothel.

She was afraid of our mistress because she had come into the brothel and the guards had all slumped over at once. They had looked dead. Then the children were all split up and sent new places. She was one of three who had been kept by the Frosts, and the only one brought to Africa.

Once I had explained that my mother was an Ambassador and I was not a communist traitor (keeping my mother's own doubts on this topic to myself), JJ took to me as if I were her lost (perhaps dead) elder sister.

Even when my English improved and the other slaves stopped treating me like an idiot clown, JJ was the only one I trusted. She was clearly going to be an incredibly pretty teenager, and I took it upon myself to protect her from those who looked like they might be interested in taking some of that for themselves. Somehow, being the mistress' concubine, no matter how unused, meant that I was off limits. Emma being a telepath enforced certain rules to a degree that I doubted was matched in other households.

But although everyone was aware our Mistress could know what we were thinking if she bothered to check, there was still a lot of negative sentiment surrounding her. Even the mutant servants thought that she was too young, too arrogant, and too powerful. The humans were obviously afraid of her and her powers, but they also saw her youth, and that seemed to give them leave to hate her.

The talk reminded me of Irina's warnings, and I wondered, for the first time, if my fellows moved towards violence, would I betray them to save our lives, or would they kill me for being a traitor.

***


	2. Chapter 2

2

One of the things I learned while in Moscow was that work is a solace. My mother had always been proud of her important job. She loved it so much that I often wondered if she loved it more than me. But once she lost it, once she was an ambassador for a government that no longer existed, she fell apart. Even when there was no hope, which had been the case for many months before the end, just doing, acting, had kept her whole and sane. When it was over, when we were trapped in a small town, in a small house, living on charity, she cleaned. When the floors were scrubbed and the laundry bleached, she would polish her gun; polish her anger, her resentment, her victimization.

In the end, I could not see the difference between her maddened polishing and her passionate addiction to international affairs. When the nations fell, when all she believed in turned out to be just words, just lies, it seemed obvious to me that either task was just a way to pass the day, eat the hours, make yourself feel that your life was worthwhile.

Pride is the true measure of human existence.

I've lived in miserable places, miserable situations in my life, in cultures where women were worth nothing when divorced from their relationship to a man, who could not take pride in themselves. But they took pride in the successes of their children. They took pride in the regularity and order of their households. They fulfilled their duties to the highest degree they could, and they died satisfied, their lives worth no less than the greatest of kings and conquerors.

I had never been able to find that duty that I could take pride in completing. Always a foreigner, I was always out of place. My friends and companions knew their place, could see their future with a solidity and confidence that escaped me entirely. When I was a child and we lived in the Middle East, all I wanted was to get married. I wanted to be someone's second or third wife, low in the hierarchy so that there would always be someone to tell me what to do. I wanted to be surrounded by family, have children, who I would put before myself, and who would take care of me when they were old enough.

I was eleven when I told my mother this, and she told me it was an irresponsible thing to want. She told me that I was weak and foolish and old-fashioned to want something like that. To please her I had to be like her. I had to be selfish. I had to be memorable. I had to be an individual success. I knew better than to ask her what it all would be worth after I was dead. Would I be satisfied, always striving for this unreachable goal of glory?

I went to the secret church held in the basement of one of the abandoned factories in town and sat with the old ladies, staring at the bloodstained image of Christ unrolled and hung on the wall, surrounded by muttering in Ukrainian accented Latin.

I gave myself the stigmata once, in our kitchen, with a paring knife. My mother freaked out when she came in to find me bleeding all over the floor. She wouldn't understand that I wanted to know what it felt like, so I would be prepared.

"Prepared for _what?_" She cursed me, and bandaged my hands and feet, then made me scrub the floor.

Prepared for sacrifice, I wanted to tell her, prepared to fail. He died for our sins, they said over and over again. He died because of our sins, he died to end them, to protect us, and yet every day there are only more. Duty without pride, duty without satisfaction. There was something alluring in that, if only in the inevitable relief of death.

I listened to my mother's curses as she received the news of our world falling to the mutant empire. She fought it as best she could in the ways she knew. She called in contacts, powerful friends, _mutant_ friends, who laughed at her and told her that it was too late. They were sorry, and she should stay in the Soviet Union, because this was their chance. It was their chance for freedom, and they followed Erik Magnus as if he were Moses, leading the slaves out of Egypt.

He was a one-man army. He could stand alone in front of tanks, of rockets, of battleships, and rip them apart. At his side were the Xavier brothers, one physically unstoppable, the other mentally so. And everywhere they went, the miserable, oppressed mutants rose up behind them, beating off troops with baseball bats and snow shovels if they had no useful powers. I had seen the reports on my mother's desk, seen the carnage that resulted, and every day stared out at the road that led past our house waiting for it to happen here.

The reason revolution came so much slower in the USSR than elsewhere was because Stalin had decreed that all mutants were to be transported to Siberia. They were captives and science experiments. Unlike in the US where they were an underclass, but free citizens, here they were kept under close guard. Eventually though, they broke out, and having lived together for so long, they were already an army.

I only wondered if it was my duty to die fighting this revolution for a moment. I had seen enough of how mutants were treated before, and thought, like a good traitor, that humanity had brought this upon itself.

Irina was one of the few who understood me when I said that dreams and ideologies were just words. The search for a meaning to life was itself a lie. But she asked me what meaning I would pick for myself. Those without meaning die at their own hand, she said, those with too much die at the hands of others like them. Find somewhere in the middle, a meaning you can live with but not die for.

I wonder sometimes, if my life hadn't been like this, if hadn't been tossed into this floating world, of power and anger and violence, of futility and hopelessness, would I have sought a way to help save the world. If I could have believed in my own power to change things in a positive way, would I have found satisfaction and pride in pursuing that path, even if it were always a stopgap, even if I could never truly save anything?

But in my reality, in the gulag, in Moscow, in the slave quarters in Genosha, those who spoke of change spoke of bombs strapped beneath their clothes.

I had seen enough death: my town, the frozen and diseased in Siberia, helping to fill the mass graves outside of Moscow with the bodies of human and mutant soldiers, whom I often could not tell apart in death. Some of the slaves could not face their fate, and cleaning the stables I often cut down a suicide, mopped up the blood.

Irina told me to choose a meaning, and I chose the one that had made sense to me as a child. I felt like a child again, in a world I did not understand, in a language that meant nothing to me, with rules and pathways shrouded in thorn bushes. My choice was work. I did my duty, and I took pride in doing it well. That was all I had. But it was all I needed.

***

I hardly saw my mistress for the first six months I lived in Genosha, and she never touched me. She was clearly busy with her court intrigues and rivalries for power, and sometimes, when I caught a glimpse of her ranting at one of her assistants, or looking blank as a servant tried to explain the chemical consistency of chocolate truffles, and why it was impossible to bring a box of them intact through the African heat without refrigeration, I wondered whether she was old enough to be interested in sex.

But finally she called me into her chambers. She looked awkward and young when she saw me, and actually flushed and avoided my eyes. I wondered what had encouraged this. Had someone at court questioned her maturity? Perhaps someone her age had been flaunting his or her sexual prowess. It had to be a competition, for she was far too uncomfortable to actually want it.

She asked me my name, perfunctorily, and I told her, not expecting her to use it or to remember. I had nearly forgotten it, since Jennifer was the only one who used it. When I was no longer 'new girl,' the other slaves called me 'Moscow.' I didn't bother to explain how offensive that was to someone from the Ukraine.

It was blatantly obvious what she had called me for. If the fact that she had called me directly to her bedroom was not enough, the hip-length white silk robe, which was all that she wore, was a large hint. The only thing I was unsure about was why it was me she had chosen. Technically I was the only slave classed as a concubine, but from what I had heard went on in other households, few masters paid much attention to such details.

My stomach was twisting in nervous tension, because imagining that you could obey, that you could do whatever work was commanded of you, was simple, the imagined humiliation and debasement a pleasant trickle on your skin. Actually doing it was not at all the same.

I kept my eyes down, uncomfortable with looking at her when she could see me doing so. My mistress had always been exceptionally direct. When she bothered to notice something we were doing that she thought was wrong, she never had any trouble saying it. When she wanted something complicated done she would say it and expect it to be done perfectly. If it wasn't she would thrust the concept into the foreman's head without preamble. But in this case she seemed to be having a hard time finding the words she needed.

It was almost shocking to be faced with her acting like this, stumbling over simple words, and skirting the issue at such a distance that if it hadn't been obvious due to context, I would have wondered what on earth she was talking about. It was so out of character that I almost played dumb so that I could enjoy the experience longer.

But she used my name, and I couldn't help but glance up. She was running her hands through her hair, agitatedly making a ponytail in her fist. Her hair was longer than it had been when I first arrived. She also wasn't as painfully skinny. I wondered if it was relief at not having to live on the same continent as her father anymore. The slinky robe she wore was half slipping off her shoulder. She looked utterly mortified, and I couldn't help take pity on her.

It wasn't as if this was more forced than it had been with Irina, where it was trade for protection and mutual warmth. But as much as I found it awkward to look at her, Emma had no trouble looking at me. And it was that, and her use of my name, that made it different. For the first time in too long, I felt that I existed. I wasn't Moscow, I wasn't a pair of hands or a piece of furniture, to be unacknowledged and ignored. And Emma, my mistress, was embarrassed and threatened by my presence. She was attracted to me, and that made it even easier.

I knelt on the lush thick rug and gestured for her to sit on the edge of the bed. She stood stiffly unable to move, and I held back my smile with difficulty. "Sit," I told her, a command.

She sat, but kept her legs pressed tightly together, her head bowed forward, a curtain of silky hair obscuring her face. I ran my fingers up her bare calves and over her knees. She looked up, and I smiled at her, trying to coax her into it.

Conflict was written clearly in her expression. At that moment it seemed very clear that women had never been made for power. There was so much vulnerability in this. I thought 'baring the tender underbelly' and had to work very hard not to laugh. A laugh at this moment would probably get me killed, and I would deserve it.

Instead I unbuttoned my shirt, took it off, and folded it carefully so it wouldn't get wrinkled. When I turned back, Emma was staring at me, desperate and unhappy, but with just a hint of hope. Her knees had gone limp, and I pushed them apart. She didn't help, but she didn't resist. Her fingers dug into the bedspread and she was biting down on her lower lip so hard I thought it might bleed.

I couldn't give her the chance to panic and push me away, and I couldn't let myself think too much about what I was doing, or I would never manage it.

She wanted me. I could feel it and smell it and taste it, and that had to be enough to make it okay.

It was only when I returned to the downstairs that I realized something had changed. Everyone knew where I had been and what I had done, and my fellows looked at me in disgust. They were laborers, they thought, but I was a whore. There was a line somewhere that I hadn't seen, and although they had always known that this was what I had been bought for, actually doing it separated me from them.

They told me I ought to hate her for making me into a pariah, into someone despised, but all I could remember were her fingers threading through my hair, twisting tightly as I made her gasp and whimper until she fell back on the bed with a mewling sigh. I could not forget the way she laid there, limp, overwhelmed and helpless, nor the involuntary mumbled 'Thank you' as I left.

She hadn't made me into a whore. They had.

***


	3. Chapter 3

3

My mistress did not call for me again until a month had past. Downstairs the looks of disgust my fellows gave me were superceded by mockery and ridicule. Everyone still stayed at a distance, as if they would catch my disease if they touched me, even on accident, but their words were cutting.

"She should have called for me," said Cyrus, a broad-shouldered footman. "I wouldn't have been sent back down so quick. I wouldn't have been sent back down at all." But he was one of the ones who would jump out of my way if I came near him, like I was cursed. And when he wasn't laughing he would look at me in disgust, as if he could see mutant fingerprints on my body.

JJ didn't understand why everyone avoided me now, but she didn't hang onto me anymore. She knew better than to take my arm in public even if she still ate with me and slept in the same room. But she didn't understand. When the others spit after they spoke to me, as if warding off evil spirits or spoke crudely behind my back, she would get angry, but she didn't know what was wrong and she didn't know how to fix it, so she would huddle in her bed and cry.

She asked me what had happened, what Emma had _done_ to me. Had she hurt me? I said no. Was it hard work, like cleaning the downstairs bathrooms? I almost laughed at that. In a way it was hard, but not physically. And compared to suicide watch or death detail, like I had worked back in Moscow, it wasn't even emotionally difficult.

Jennifer wasn't a fool. She had turned thirteen that year although she didn't look it. With her round face and innocent eyes, I doubted she'd ever look her age. She had some conception of what sex was by then, it was hard not to in the gossipy downstairs with doors that did not lock. She didn't know why what I had done was different from other jobs, why it was more degrading.

It was hard to say, because I wasn't the one who found it degrading. In fact, it was less degrading than other jobs I had done. In Siberia, in Moscow I had sometimes been supervised directly by mutants who thought of me as nothing but a tool. Many were in the military, and often treated their subordinates with disrespect, but I was lower than that, rank-less, less status than a captured enemy because technically I was not even a person. I was a broom with ears. That was degrading, being stepped over or on, having your piles or your buckets turned over because you were beneath their notice. It was almost the same as the way my fellow slaves treated me now, as if I were less than human. And human itself was already a low, degraded status.

The only way I could understand it was in the context of death detail, stripping the bodies of their boots and their brass, tossing them into pits in their underwear. It was about the body. The body meant so much to humans. It was probably the reason for our current state of slavery. For many mutants, it was their body that changed, and that was why we rejected them. Cripples, the aged, other races, even the battling sexes were all differences in the body, and reasons enough for us to hate. And when you touched a body, particularly a verboten part, you were touched by it as well. It was probably why weapons were invented. Hand to hand combat could only be done with an equal.

I didn't know if that would make any sense to JJ. But I tried to explain it.

"It's embarrassing to see someone naked, isn't it?" I started, awkwardly. JJ nodded assent. I tried to skip past explaining why it was embarrassing. It was not something I could fully understand. Ownership didn't really make sense in this world. We didn't own our bodies. We didn't own the labor done by our own hands. I couldn't say that someone touching your body without permission was a violation of your right to control your own body. If it was someone besides your master, then it was theft, but if it was your master, it was entirely legal. "And touching someone naked is…"

"Kinda gross," JJ filled in, wrinkling her nose.

"It… can be. And sex is, well, beyond touching. It's not just brushing against the boundaries of the body, it's going inside, breaking through a wall that even looking at is… socially unacceptable."

Jennifer cringed. "I don't understand why _anyone_ would want to do that. It sounds… really awful."

I laughed quietly. I couldn't say that I had had a romantic sexual experience; even my first had been more experimental than enjoyable, so I doubted I would oversell it. "It's not that bad. Not when you're with someone you trust, someone you don't mind seeing naked and who you know won't laugh at you."

JJ frowned and I could read her next question on her face.

"I think that's why they're disgusted by it. It should be personal, and even if it isn't emotionally intimate, it _is_, inherently, physically intimate. Especially because there's often an…" I gulped and went for it. "An exchange of fluids."

"What!" JJ looked horrified and disgusted. A certain amount of gossip did not an expert make. "Did _you_ do that?"

I didn't meet her gaze. "It's different from other kinds of work because of that. Even though everyone else works for her, everything they do with their bodies is to her benefit; their bodies are still only externally marked by her brand. For me… it's internal. There's no real difference. They eat her food, bathe in her water, cleanse themselves with her soap, but they can pretend that their bodies are pure and mine is not."

JJ looked down at her hands. "Why do they spit in your food?"

I had eaten worse, but I hated it anyways. JJ played games with the plates, getting my meals for me so they wouldn't risk contaminating hers too. It wouldn't last for too long. If she kept associating with me, even her angel face couldn't keep them from despising her like they despised me.

"It's the same thing. They want some way to mark me, to own me, make sure I am lower than them. If they didn't hate me for it, perhaps they would think I was special to be singled out for this."

"Why did she choose you?"

I still could not guess.

"Why don't you hate it? I think that's part of the reason they're all so angry with you."

"And if I had pretended to feel horrified and abused they would pity me instead of bully me. It's my work. It was what I was asked to do, and I like to take pride in completing my tasks well. Deny me that, and you deny me satisfaction. Others might be satisfied with futile plotting or laziness, but I am not like that."

"No." JJ gave me a weak smile. "I like that about you. I like to be able to feel proud when the faucets are all shiny. I wouldn't want you to change that."

"I don't hate her. She's a mutant, but that isn't a reason to hate someone." I had based most of my assumption of her character on the garbled story Jennifer had told about being taken from the brothel. In other ways she was childish and petulant, but I wasn't about to blame someone for being young.

"She scares me. She shouts in my head when she's angry."

"She does?" I had been around her when she grew annoyed with a crew of workers. Everyone around me had cringed away from what I thought was merely an imperious look. I had always wondered why they reacted so strongly. "She doesn't in mine."

JJ looked at me from the side, hesitant in asking. "Do you trust her?"

I considered the definition of trust I had given her earlier. Did I trust her not to laugh at my body? I did, if only because the way she was so obviously attracted to me. And there was no way I could say I was offended at having to look at her naked form. It was just a pity that she only called for me once.

***

My fellows seemed to be trying to keep me away from her. I worked up in the gardens on the roof for weeks shoveling manure, and then downstairs scrubbing floors and bathrooms. If they wanted to shame me by giving me dirty difficult work, they failed. I was never ashamed of work. But finally they risked sending me up to change the linens while our mistress was at court. She came back unexpectedly, to retrieve a forgotten item, and walked into her bedroom while I was attempting to spread the sheet across the bed by myself. My assigned companion had disappeared, revolted by the company and the location. I was bending over and didn't notice that she had come in until I straightened up and saw her, still standing in the doorway, watching me with an indecipherable look on her face.

A moment too late I realized I shouldn't be scrutinizing her expression and quickly ducked my head. She walked briskly past me and gathered a few papers from her desk in the adjoining room. Then she left, saying nothing to me.

It was that night she called me to her rooms once more.

"Moscow, the mistress wants you," called Aaron, the foreman of the downstairs.

Somehow, at first, I was sure it was going to be a scolding for not getting her sheets smooth enough, but when I reached her room and saw her pacing from end to end, looking frustrated and irritated, I suspected it might be another reason.

Her wide-eyed expression when she noticed my presence was charming, as always. And then she scowled and cursed the air in vain.

"I don't _like_ this," she said with a sharp frown. "I don't like wanting this."

"You don't have to explain yourself," I said softly, but she looked up sharply, surprised at my interruption. I thought it was strange at first, her resistance to her own desires, but she was so young, and in her world self-control was one of the most important virtues. Her father had used me to make a statement, tell her that he knew she couldn't control herself, that even she would eventually succumb to her lusts. I wondered vaguely why he had chosen me for this, but perhaps it was merely a general statement, and he did not expect her to actually use me. But she had. She had broken down before her own principles and her father's challenge, and that shamed her.

Her expression was pained. I doubted she even knew the words she ought to use to order me to serve her. I went to my knees. She gave a short nod and stood awkwardly, reaching for the fastening on her pants. I stopped her, my hand cupped over hers, and she looked at me again, slightly desperate and utterly confused. But I wanted to do it; it would give me the time I needed to adjust, to make myself believe that I wanted her.

In an oddly vindictive way I did. She could order me to do whatever she wished, her decision to use me could turn me into a pariah, but I could destroy her prized self-control and leave her a whimpering mess.

I guided her to sit and moved up her body, never standing over her, never trying to make my power over her explicit. I was there to serve her. And as I opened her shirt I tasted her skin. Her fingers curled into the blankets. She bit down on her lip and hated herself.

I had almost forgotten, after a month of mockery, disgust, and harassment, why I hadn't felt degraded by this. But here, now, my lips on her skin, my hands sliding her pants over her hips, the distinct strain in her muscles as she tried to resist, I could not comprehend the idea that I could be any less for this when it made me feel as if I had the power to rule the world.

She lay naked and wilted as I stood to leave. She murmured something as I turned away and I was at the door before I realized that what she had said was, "Don't go."

I stopped and glanced back to find her looking at me, her eyes as vulnerable and intent as JJ's begging for comfort after a nightmare. Somehow I knew she didn't expect me to stay. It had been a request, not an order.

Shutting the door again I walked back over to the bed. Emma wriggled under the covers and held them open for me. I shucked off my trousers and crawled in, stiffly, not sure exactly what she wanted. The moment I lay down she draped herself over me, burying her face in my hair and breathing in. I lay there frozen, aroused, uncomfortable, and in mere moments I was informed she was asleep, if only by the rumbling snores in my ear.

***


	4. Chapter 4

4

I hadn't expected to wake up with her. I hadn't planned on going to sleep. I was just waiting for her to roll over, or at least shift her weight off of me. But clean sheets and a mattress that deep and soft had a soporific effect.

When I awoke I didn't know where I was. There was light coming in through the curtains, instead of the dim twilight of my windowless room downstairs. And for once I felt like I had had enough sleep, waking up naturally instead of to our foreman shouting and banging on the doors as he called us to work. Shifts started at five in the morning and ended at ten pm, curfew at midnight. Five hours of sleep was a luxury we rarely got, but that morning there was only silence, and I rolled over, seeking the heat of the body beside me.

I thought, for a moment, that I was still a child, waking up on a bright morning of a New England summer, nothing to do but laze the day away. It was a part of my life I had tried not to think of for a long time, since before the revolution, because I had been happy then, confident and at home. I had had a father and a mother then, friends as well. I was not yet lost in a land where I would always be the foreigner.

Squinting in the light, I opened my eyes and saw her watching me, discomfort vividly written on her face. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the sunlight seemed to strip me bare, more than she was, tangled hair brushing over naked shoulders.

I hastened out of her bed and into my pants, nearly toppling over as my legs tangled in them. I felt sick. I had overstayed. I had taken advantage of the situation, of her vulnerability, and I knew she would not call for me again. Honestly, what must it be like to awaken and find that your bed had been invaded by a slug, a vile worm, a parasite?

I did not look back as I stumbled out the door and ran towards the back stairs. I reached my floor as the clock struck nine. Aaron grabbed the back of my shirt as I hurtled past, and I slipped, sliding across the worn floors and hitting the wall face first, tumbling into a crumpled heap at the base.

"Where have you been?" he cursed at me. "You missed curfew! You missed your first two shifts!"

"I was with the mistress," I tried to make out with my hand covering my mouth where it had gone numb from its impact with the wall.

"For eleven hours?" He pushed his hand against his head, black hair spiking up between his fingers. His expression was mildly nauseated, disgusted by the images in his mind.

"I overslept."

"You're assigned to the roof." He gave me a long, searching look. I wondered what he was searching for. Regret? Humility? Satisfaction? "Report to the posts at midday."

Forty for shirking was going to be my punishment. I knew that. It wasn't unreasonable. Aaron was fair. He had been chosen as foreman because of that quality.

It sometimes struck me as ingenious, the way they made us choose our masters and punish ourselves. In the gulag they hadn't done that, and once there had been a small rebellion where a mutant who was too free with the whip stepped inside an enclosure alone and was mobbed and murdered by the humans there. All of them had been executed for it. But if the one punishing you was one of your own, there was little risk of vengeance.

I hadn't been whipped since I left the gulag, and never punished for shirking. Even the ones who hated me knew that I never avoided work. So when I was called to the posts, a frame built on the stage at one end of the refectory, while my fellows were eating their midday meal, there were far more stares and whispers than usual. Others were called up for drunkenness or laziness. Theft was referred upstairs. But five was the heaviest punishment regularly given.

When Aaron announced that I would receive forty for missing two full shifts, the refectory fell into dead silence. I climbed up the stage and bound up my hair, stripping off my shirt, wrinkled from sleeping in it, and soiled from working in the gardens that morning. Then I stretched over the frame and took hold of the farthest bar.

Cyrus was the one who wielded the whip. In Russia they had used proper horsewhips, but here the whip was a long rod of Kevlar, as flexible as a willow branch, wrapped in braided nylon with a leather cap on the end and a leather handgrip. It was designed to raise welts, but not cut the skin. In that, it was usually successful. Cyrus let it run over my back before he began, and he bent to whisper in my ear.

"I hope you enjoyed your night as much as I'll enjoy this," he said. I did not wonder if he were jealous or merely repelled by me and sadistic.

My knuckles were white where they gripped the bar. The strokes hurt less if your muscles were tensed, but if you relaxed and then tried to re-tense, every welt would ache again. And if you were too slow, a quick lash across an unprepared target could elicit an involuntary cry. I did not want to cry out. Cyrus hated stoics and would hit harder, in more sensitive places, for those who tried to retain their dignity. A few men who were up here too often for not being able to keep their paws out of the liquor cabinet had leaned to moan and groan playfully at each cut of the whip. If they made him laugh, he wouldn't hit so hard. But he hated me already, and forty was far too many to take with ease.

I could take it. It was only physical pain. But still, when the whip cut across my shoulder blades for the first time, my teeth clenched together as I bit down on my scream and I realized I had underestimated the degree of agony. I would not cry out, I told myself; I would not weaken like that. But my back was a blazing mass of pain from shoulder to hip. Aaron cried out, "ten!" The whip wrapped around my waist, stinging like a viper.

My shoulders gave out first. I was draped over the frame, too weak to hold myself in position. The bars pressed into my chest, my stomach, my thighs, my shins and the lashing did not stop. There was no untouched inch of space on my back, so the whip slashed crosswise over previous welts, turning throbbing anguish into screaming pain. I tasted blood in my mouth and realized that I had bit down on my tongue, but I could not even feel it, the pain was so minor in comparison.

We had only reached fifteen when I started to cry, tears streaming down my face. I could hardly breathe, gasping for air at each stroke, but they were coming too fast for me to breath out in anything but a choke. Blood pounded in my head, and my vision, though only of my bloodless knuckles, swam. I thought I might loose consciousness. "Twenty!" Aaron called out, though I could barely hear him through the buzzing in my ears.

The strikes stopped and I spared a glance toward Cyrus, who was flexing his hands. He wasn't used to delivering so many strokes at once, either. I did my best to drag myself into a better position, my welts protesting at every motion. But I needed my feet flat on the floor or my already sore knees would be decorated with as many bruises as my back.

Cyrus raised his arm and struck again. "Twenty one!" My gasp was slightly voiced, almost a cry, but I had not screamed, I had not begged him to stop. I could take it. I just could not think that I had nearly twice as many again to go. Each one had to be new, or the accumulation of anticipation would destroy me.

Although tired, Cyrus' strokes grew heavier, not lighter. Instead of slashing with his wrist, he brought the whip down with the full momentum of his arm. It cut less, and stung less, but it bludgeoned already tender skin. But the strikes came slower as well. I could breathe. It gave me longer to register the agony.

I could not bear it anymore. I hung by fingers barely hooked over the bar, too weak to clutch it tightly. I clenched my teeth and shut my eyes and wished I were dead.

"Thirty!" And something soothing, a liquid, trickled down my back. It was not cool, but the welts throbbed less at its touch.

I did not know that the room, already full of silent staring watchers, went dead still at that moment, when my skin caught on the leather cap of the whip and split open, blood running down my back. When the whip connected again and then pulled back, my blood spattered across the room, marking the walls and staining the audience in their silent horror.

"Hey! Enough!" someone shouted.

"Thirty-five," Aaron said, more weakly than he had called the rest. Even Cyrus looked over at him, unsure of whether he should continue. But he made no move to stop it. The whip came down again, low on my waist.

"Thirty-six."

The next one cut across the base of my neck. I wept because I could do nothing else.

"Thirty-seven."

Again on my waist, nearly following the same track as the previous one. I hardly felt it.

"Thirty-eight."

Cyrus caught my neck and the tops of my shoulders with the lash. The tip came around in a snaking curve and cut my cheek.

"Thirty-nine."

The last one was a straight shot across my shoulder blades, above the cut, and across another four like it. It was almost a relief.

"Forty."

There was nothing but silence.

***

I crouched on the tiles in one of the baths and JJ squeezed water out of a sponge to run down my back, trying to wash the blood off without touching the mass of bruising weals. I felt too sick and weak with hunger and pain to risk soaking it off in the bath.

"Some of it's dried, I'm going to have to…" JJ's expression looked more anguished than I felt.

"Go ahead."

She seemed to whimper visually.

"Get it over with. The anticipation makes it worse." That was a lie. The scratch of the sponge over my open wound and tender skin felt like a cheese grater. I couldn't help the hiss of pain and JJ looked like she was about to cry. "Please, just wrap it, quickly."

Wiping her tears on her sleeve, Jennifer did her best to bandage the cut, but she was afraid to pull it tight against my other injuries. "Tighter," I had to tell her. "Tighter," until I could feel it resist when I breathed. "We don't want to be late."

I dressed quickly to report to my assignment before the midday break ended. I hadn't eaten anything for breakfast or dinner, but I doubted I could keep it down as it was, not when I wanted to vomit every time my shirt brushed against my welts.

Aaron caught me before I went up to the roof. His expression was pained and guilty. I couldn't help but be disgusted by him. He decided on the punishment, he went through with it even when he saw what it was like, and _now_ he felt guilty? What use was that?

"Dinner service," he mumbled. "They're polishing silver this shift."

I hadn't been on dinner service since she had called for me the first time. It was light duty without much supervision and was usually given to someone who deserved a treat or had done a favor for the foreman. He glanced down at JJ. "You too."

If anything the other slaves assigned to the same duties were even more skittish around me. But they looked at me with pity and a little horror now. It made me angry rather than appeased. I had missed two shifts and been punished for it. I had taken what I deserved and now they were doing me favors because I bled and cried in front of them? I felt humiliated by their attentions.

It was also hard for me to focus. I was hungry and sickened and the fumes from the silver polish made my head spin. I kept on dropping things, but no one yelled at me.

They needed someone to go collect the silver candlesticks from around the house, and I jumped at the chance to get out of that oppressive atmosphere. Even Jennifer's solicitude was grating. I moved quickly, gathering an armload of candlesticks and other silver items.

I was taking the ones off the sideboard in the foyer when the front door banged open and Emma stalked in, sweat slick on her forehead and darkening her hair. She was breathing hard and threw her court robes toward the coat tree with a startling viciousness. They missed and fell in a heap on the ground. Her shirt was soaked, and no one was with her. A footman was always supposed to be waiting in her car and another in the elevator to escort her up and take her robes. But it looked like she had run the whole way back from court and taken the stairs as well.

I froze, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, even while carrying ten pounds of solid silver. I didn't need her looking at me, not after screwing up so badly the night before. I had let myself get comfortable, far too comfortable. I had felt in control, and I had liked that feeling, so been willing to do her a favor, forgetting entirely who was the mistress, whose bed it was, and all consideration of my place. She had every right to punish me.

She didn't notice me, stormed right past, heading for her rooms, and I sidled towards the door to the kitchens. My heart was fluttering fast, and I felt lightheaded. I was terrified of her opprobrium and what would result from her attention. I had almost reached the doorway when she suddenly stopped short and turned toward me. She looked furious and contemptuous. Her eyes were red as if she had been crying. She advanced towards me, threateningly.

"_Don't_-" she started, her voice sounding blunt and rough.

I skittered backwards, my injured back and shoulders coming into sudden harsh contact with the doorframe. I gasped, dizzy and anguished, and staggered back again, into the open archway that led to the parlor.

She looked surprised. I didn't wonder why. I swiveled to run, but the quick turn made my head spin in lurching spirals. Whirling sounds filled my ears and the room started to twist. A glinting waterfall splashed to the floor, warping like mercury. I didn't recognize it as the silver.

The world was bent in sickening curves. I glanced over my shoulder at Emma, who seemed smeared and inchoate. Her mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. I shook my head.

_Emily! _

The word plunged into my mind like an arrow from a longbow. _She remembers my name_ I thought, and everything went black.

***


	5. Chapter 5

5

"Welcome back, sleeping beauty," said a cheerful voice above me.

I squinted, because all I could see was a large blue blob. It was moving and… wearing glasses. The blueness settled, finally, into a furry creature in a lab coat. It reached out to touch me and I cringed away. The creature looked hurt, and I felt guilty. I had not had much experience with such physically inhuman mutants, but I had reacted to him the way others reacted to me.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled weakly, and lifted my arm slightly, so he could adjust the IV.

He gave me a sympathetic look, and I curled into myself, away from his kindness. He was a mutant. Why would he find it worthwhile to be kind to me?

"You need to take more care of yourself," he said, tapping my nose. "I cleaned up your back." I moved slightly. The bandages were new and skillfully wrapped. It didn't hurt. "A bit of anti-bacterial and some topical anesthetic."

"Why?"

"_Someone_ doesn't like to see people passed out all over her carpet." He glanced back over his shoulder. I followed his gaze. Emma was leaning against the doorframe, glaring pointedly at nothing. With a horrible sinking feeling I realized that I was back in my mistress' bed, exactly where I ought not to be.

"Thank you," I muttered hurriedly, and tried to sit up, but a restraining blue paw landed on my shoulder.

"No, my dear, you're staying here until that bag is empty." He pointed at the IV, still half full of fluid. "Do you think you could eat something?"

I nodded. My stomach growled in accompaniment. He picked up a plate of chapattis off the side table and offered it to me.

"Lets try plain at first, get something in there so you can take your anti-inflammatories."

It felt so incredibly wrong to have a mutant serving me. My mistress was in the door like a guardian. I was in her bed and being looked after. I felt so sick I could hardly choke down a few bites of the bread. But apparently it had been enough and the mutant doctor handed me two pills and a glass of water. I took them obediently.

"Low blood sugar, dehydration and blood loss are not a happy threesome," he said, pointing his claw at me instructively. "Please try to eat regularly. Get plenty of rest, and ice your back to reduce the swelling."

"Yes, my lord," I said awkwardly, unsure of how to address him since I did not know his title. He laughed and patted my head.

"None of that now. I'm Henry McCoy, and look," he pointed to the IV, "you're all done." He popped the needle out of my arm and patted it with a cotton ball.

I slid out of bed as quickly as I could without falling. "Thank you, Dr. McCoy." I gave him a half bow and sped towards the door. My mistress stepped aside to let me pass, fixing me with a long cold look. I didn't know what it meant, but it made me shiver, and I ducked through the door, ready to bolt for the stairs.

A furry paw caught my arm. Dr. McCoy handed me the plate of chapattis. "Better take that with you. I think Emma may have made a bit of a mess of the downstairs, and supper might be late getting started."

***

The downstairs was dark and silent as a grave. I walked through the dim hallways, meeting no one, the fear creeping up on me from behind. Then I found the first body.

I crouched and took his pulse. He was still alive, just unconscious. I checked everyone I came to. Bodies were scattered throughout the halls, in ones and twos, a few groups that I had seen together before. They had been taken down as they were encountered, no chance to flee. They were all limp, slumped bonelessly, but breathing shallowly.

Then I reached the refectory. It was packed with unconscious bodies, spread across tables, collapsed on the floor. All of them wore expressions of pain or horror.

Cyrus was bound to the posts, his back a bloody mess. Aaron was hanging by his wrists from the ceiling, stripped to the waist, also viciously beaten, front and back.

I had seen too many people hanging, and I hurried to him, picking my way through the tangle of fallen bodies. He was breathing, but weakly. I cut him down, positioning his head between his knees. I cut Cyrus off the posts. I couldn't look at his wounds, even thinking that my back had looked the same earlier that day made me want to vomit.

I looked out, over the silent bodies, the light dim and casting black shadows in their crevasses.

"Emily?"

I caught sight of a glint of light on silk, and felt a flash of panic, irrationally thinking that my mistress had followed me into this dungeon. But it was JJ, peeking out from under one of the tables.

"Are you all right?" I went to her, careful to not crush a hand or a face under my feet.

She crawled out, nodding, and buried herself in my arms. "It was… it was so awful. Everyone was screaming. And they…" She pointed to the men on the stage. "They moved like puppets, and they started hurting each other." She choked on a sob and pressed her face into my chest. "Why were they hurting each other?"

I couldn't answer. I could only wonder if this was my fault.

***

I had asked myself once if Irina had seen that I would make the decision to send a few people to their fates to save the greater portion. I had never even considered the reverse.

Emma had tortured everyone because they hurt me. I couldn't find any other way to understand it. She had been angry when she came in. Something had obviously set her off before. You don't run five miles in ceremonial robes for no reason, but what she had done to her slaves was unprecedented… and what she had done for me was bewildering.

I found the chapattis where I had left them, by the first victim of her rampage. A few people were starting to wake up. I didn't want to be there when they put two and two together.

Jennifer sat huddled on my bed, eating the bread. She looked at me, sadly. "I don't understand," she said, quietly. "Why is this happening?"

I pressed my fingers to my eyes. I had no answers for her.

"Why did they have to hurt you today? Is your back all right?"

I nodded. "A doctor looked at it."

JJ swallowed hard. "When you didn't come back with the silver, I went to look for you. You were on the floor. I couldn't, I didn't know if you were still alive. She was there, and I thought… But she was too scared to touch you. You were bleeding again. The bandages were all…" She looked up at me, her lips pinched tightly together, her eyes glistening. "I helped her carry you to her bed. I showed her… what they did. She went in my head to see what had happened. And she was so angry. I could feel her get angry. She shouted like thunder in my mind and told me to wait for the doctor and let him in." JJ looked down. "But I didn't. I followed her, and everyone… everyone started screaming. Her eyes were all black, and she wouldn't stop. And then they started to hurt each other, Mr. Foreman and Cyrus, and I…" She scrubbed at her face with her fist. "I was happy that they were getting hurt like they hurt you. But they were screaming, and they still couldn't stop hurting each other. And I… I hid under the table."

It seemed to me that Jennifer understood a lot more than she gave herself credit for. I tugged out the collar of my shirt and did my best to look at the clean bandages on my back. I couldn't comprehend any of this.

"If I were a mutant, I would have done it."

I looked at her, confused.

"I would have done it for you. I would want them to all feel as bad as you did."

"You shouldn't," I tried to say. "You shouldn't want that. I missed work. I got what I deserved. I didn't want them to be punished for treating me fairly."

"It wasn't fair," JJ shook her head. "None of it was. You weren't here; you didn't just sleep in. You had to work all night. And then they punished you for it, like they always do, punishing you for doing the work that they're too scared and grossed out to do."

In some ways I thought that she was right. But she didn't know how it had felt that morning, before I had to remember where I was and the panic and misery choked my heart in bindweed, what it had felt like to have enough sleep for once, to be wrapped in soft sheets, and warm, not dying of heat from living too close to the air conditioner exhaust vents.

Everyone knew how much being whipped had hurt, but I was the only on who knew how good it had felt to miss those two shifts, and wake up happy. I had cheated. My anger at them for pitying me had been unwarranted. Now that I had seen what they saw, of course they would pity me, and the blood would turn their stomachs. But tomorrow… I was so afraid of tomorrow.

I lay down on my side, setting the empty plate on the floor, and pulled the blankets over myself and JJ.

"Can I stay here tonight?" Jennifer asked, finding part of my pillow. "I'm… I'm scared."

"What of?" I asked, absently, trying to find a comfortable position to lie in, so my back wouldn't grate against the mattress.

"Everything," JJ said quietly. "Everything today was so terrifying. You weren't here when I woke up, and then… at dinner I had to throw up everything I ate. Then you disappeared again, and it looked like you were dead. And then she…" JJ burrowed into me, and involuntarily I thought of how Emma had draped herself over me the night before. It felt like she had needed me, needed _something_, more than the sex, more than release. I wondered if her vengeance would keep her warm tonight.

"I think I'm afraid of her," said Jennifer, softly.

I slipped my arms around her, my fingers threading through silky blonde hair. It was impossible to distinguish hers from the other by feel. It was impossible to tell whom I feared more.

"I think I am too."

***


	6. Chapter 6

6

The pity was gone. I missed it. Even the obvious disgust and revulsion was better than this. I didn't exist. Hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil. If I came into a room it would empty. If I spoke to someone they would turn away and speak to someone else. A few people would cross themselves when they saw me.

It shouldn't have been worse than them hating me. But they were so terrified, and there was nothing I could do. Less than nothing. If I showed any anger at the way they were treating me, a look of panic would cross their faces and they would flee.

It felt like being dead.

I couldn't even work. People would stand in between Aaron and I if I ever tried to approach him. They wouldn't look at me or tell me to leave, but they kept me away from him. I didn't blame them. They had seen hell, and it was my fault.

I wanted to be sold.

I watched them gathering in small groups in the refectory or in the hallways, comforting each other, whispering, trying to make sense of what had been done to them. From what I overheard, there was little sedition in these conversations. Even the snide criticisms, the epithets, the despising remarks that had been made about our mistress on a daily basis, easily, with the confidence of those too unimportant and weak to bother punishing, had disappeared. Their hatred had been replaced by fear.

The schedules changed. Any contact with Emma was to be avoided. The mutant servants already did most of the escorting and serving, but even the cleaning crews posted lookouts to know when she entered the building so they could disappear.

All I could do was wait for her to call me. I didn't know whether I was more impatient or more afraid for that to occur.

One man had died in the refectory that night. He was older than most and had had a heart attack from the horrors Emma had put inside his head. She had murdered him, carelessly.

The mutant servants took his body away. No one knew for certain, but there were rumors that human corpses were brought to the dump and tossed in the landfills with the rest of the waste.

I hadn't known him. He had been one who ignored me while I was new and cursed absently at me once I had become a whore. I wasn't even certain of his name until he died and I could hear the whispers about Jason this, Jason that. I wasn't invited to the memorial they held. I didn't know about it.

I walked in on it accidentally. Aaron, still bandaged and pale, stood on the stage in the refectory, speaking about him, everyone sitting quietly. He froze and stopped his speech when he saw me. The entire room turned to stare at me and I could feel their blame and their resentment like a blow. I left. It was clear I was unwelcome. I was the one who had caused his death.

The other favorite topic of conversation was what our mistress' powers truly were. Before, all they had known was that she could speak into their minds. I hadn't even seen true evidence of that until the day it happened, but now there was evidence of so much more.

The ones who crossed themselves in my presence believed that mutation was a sign of possession. They spoke of the eternal torment of hell. Now they had some idea what it was like, pain without physical cause, pain without hope of solace. According to them, all she had done was open a small channel to her home, given them a taste of the unquenchable fire.

It was the ones who could not believe in the evil supernatural who were truly horrified by her power. How could you trust a world where someone was given the ability to do that to you? What did it mean when it became clear that you were a victim, you were prey, and you never had the chance to be anything else?

It was the strong ones who suffered from this, the ones who believed that their status as slaves was misfortune, not destiny. They were the ones who discussed tactics as they ate dinner, rehashing old battles, what the human armies should have done that would have stopped this Mutant Reich. But now they had felt what real power was, and they knew themselves to be weak. They had lost the faith in their own superiority that made living as a slave bearable.

I was afraid as well, afraid of what she could do, but even more afraid because I couldn't understand why she did it. There was no reason I should be worth so much. It couldn't have been about me entirely. But whatever had been the cause, her reaction had been violent, indiscriminate, and irrational. I had always seen her as a little bit of a child, but this was a tantrum that had left a man dead and others irreparably scarred, both mentally and physically.

But when she called for me, I went.

***

It felt different this time, opening the door, stepping inside. She had stood there, waiting for me to wake up, after she had tortured fifty people, after she had murdered someone.

I couldn't call it anything else.

I couldn't understand how she had done such a thing. I had never felt that she saw me as less than a person. Her discomfort, her fear of me had shown me that. And how could a telepath, who _knew_ that everyone was truly there, was a thinking feeling being, who could see it _every moment_, ever fall victim to the lie that a person could be a thing? She must have known what she was doing. She must have felt every ounce of their pain and rejoiced in it.

My mistress was waiting, barefoot, hair still wet and clumped from washing, wrapped in her too short bathrobe. She looked like she always did, but what I saw was completely different. I could only see the woman that JJ had described, the one with black eyes, and a certain stride, her powers reaching out and choking their minds with a deadly painful grip, more cruel than a hand around their throat that stopped their breathing.

Lost in reliving that, I didn't notice her turn to look at me. I didn't notice the shock on her face, the twist of sickness in her expression.

"Stop it!"

I focused on her, but not before her hand struck my shoulder and I fell to my knees.

"Don't look at me like that!"

She sounded furious. I wasn't looking at her at all. I stared at my hands, planted on the floor, and I waited for her to continue to beat me, to strike me again. Whether it was with her hand or her mind I didn't care.

"You're looking at me wrong." The fury had fled her voice and she sounded hurt. How could she be hurt? I had to see her expression, so I peered up, through my hair, which had fallen in front of my eyes.

Emma looked desperate. She rubbed her face with the back of her fist, like Jennifer always did when she was trying not to cry. "Why are you afraid of me?" she murmured, half to herself. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Why not?" The words were out of my mouth before I could even think to restrain them. She blinked, stunned that I had responded, stunned by my response. I continued clarifying my question, against my better judgment. "You hurt everyone else. Why not me? Why am I different? Why did you choose me, single me out like this?"

My mistress' shoulders stiffened and she turned her head away. She slapped with her words. "You have no right to-"

"_I know!_" I pressed my face against the floor, covering my head with my hands as if they would offer some sort of protection from my impertinence, as if prostrating myself would elicit mercy. "I know…"

"I can't hear you."

I stayed frozen. There was no way she could not have heard that. There was no way I would not suffer for this. I heard her sigh, a little roughly, as if she were giving in.

"I'm a telepath, and I'm good at it," she said sharply, defensively. "I have incredible range and power. I can map someone's mind more quickly and accurately than Charles Xavier. But… I can't turn it off." I looked up through my fingers and wondered how someone could look so angry and speak so evenly. She wasn't looking at me. Staring at the wall, her words were crisp as if she were presenting an argument to the court. She could not look at me.

"With any other slave, I would know they were hating it, hating me. With any other mutant, I would only be able to think about what they wanted from me, how much respect they lost for me because I submitted to them. But you… your shields are surprisingly good for a human, and you didn't hate me. I just needed a little time with someone who didn't hate me." She shook her head. "You don't know what it's like to live surrounded by people who hate you."

I thought I might know more than she assumed.

"That's why?" It was some trick of fate, of biology, _nothing_… but had I expected more? "My shields?"

"You weren't always _yapping, _like everyone else." She gave me a look that clearly told me to shut up. I ducked my head and shut up.

She took a step toward me and I flinched at her touch. "You're afraid." Her fingers dug into my jaw and she lifted my chin so I didn't have any choice but to look at her. She shook her head, her hair falling across her face and shadowing her eyes. "Worthless."

I tensed. What did she mean? She let go of me and turned away.

"Get out."

I didn't understand, so I didn't move. She looked back over her shoulder, her eyes lit with anger. "Didn't you hear me?"

She spun, the back of her hand connecting with my face, striking my cheek.

"_Get out!_"

She screamed it in my head and in my ears. I scrambled to my feet and fled.

***


	7. Chapter 7

7

I just ran, not looking where I was going. I saw the footman's uniform before I hit, but I couldn't dodge, and crashed into the row of pale buttons. Hands caught my wrists and kept me from falling.

The hand was dark blue with only three massive ugly digits and long curved yellow nails. I looked up, for a moment expecting it to be the doctor, but this mutant's face was darker and narrow, with a pointy chin, pointed ears, and pupil-less glowing yellow eyes.

I recoiled in fear and disgust.

"Excuse me, Miss!"

His accent was thick and German, and he was polite and looked worried. I started to cry. It seemed that the ones who looked like demons were kind, and ones who looked like… the ones who looked like Emma had demons inside.

"Ja, please, do not…" His eyes widened. "You are bleeding." He offered me a handkerchief held between two claw-like nails. I took it and pressed it to my face, slumping to my knees.

He was right. I was bleeding from inside my mouth. My lip had caught on my teeth when my mistress had hit me.

So much for promising she wouldn't hurt me.

I wiped my face and offered it wanly back to him. He wouldn't take it. His strange hands, which would be more fitting on a dinosaur, waved it away. Instead he crouched down in front of me and asked if I was all right. I was ashamed of crying. What reason did I have? Rejection? Wasn't rejection better than having to serve that? Having to bury my head between her legs and choke on it…

"I'm fine."

Even with a face like a demon, his skepticism was clear.

"I'm _fine_," I said harshly. Speaking like that to a mutant would have gotten me shot in Moscow, but I didn't care anymore.

He looked slightly hurt and embarrassed. "Then will you help me? I am ze new footman, ja? But I was instructed to introduce myself to the mistress of the house. I am lost."

I stared at him for a moment. What were the other footmen trying to do to him, sending him to Emma's rooms when I was supposed to be there, right after her bath? I wondered if mutants hated the ones who looked different as much as humans did.

"I wouldn't go now. She's… not in a good mood. I would wait until tomorrow."

Then I stood, and started towards the stairs.

"Danke, Miss," he called after me. But I didn't turn back.

He was new. Perhaps he thought me a mutant servant. It would be strange to be mistaken for a mutant, but the shirt I wore disguised the brands on my back.

* * *

That week was the only time I seriously considered running away. Suicide by sentinel. The metal beasts had been reprogrammed to hunt humans without a letter of marque, a chip in a card that was remote controlled by their master. If the slave did not turn up at the expected time and place, the marque was turned off, and the sentinels would find him. Although the sentinels were programmed to capture, sometimes they had a hard time differentiating between capture and kill.

It was pointless to run away, because there was nowhere to run to.

But it felt pointless to stay. What did I have to live for? What future did I have here? I was a slave who wasn't allowed to work. 'Worthless' was a kind epithet for me.

Even JJ tried to stay out of my way. I was angry and unhappy, but I couldn't do anything. If I tried to join a group, they would turn their backs, and create an unbreachable rank.

I stopped going to the refectory to eat. I couldn't deal with the way they would turn from me. If I left something to mark my place, sometimes would come back to find it shoved to the center and all the seats filled. Other times I would ask if I could sit in an empty place and be flatly rejected.

I didn't leave my bed. There was nothing to leave it for. I had never realized before that nothingness and indecision were such a heavy weight.

But finally I realized it had gone on too long. They could hate me for as long as they wanted, but I couldn't hate myself anymore. I didn't deserve this. I had done what I was told to do, no more and no less.

* * *

During the pre-dinner morning shift I stole into Aaron's room and waited for him. I wandered around his room while I knew he was eating dinner. It was larger than the other slave quarters, and his alone. He had a desk, schedules carefully written out in his neat handwriting, piles of notes, mostly complaints, and some evaluations. To my surprise he had someone reporting back from every crew, rating the workers' morale, how hard they worked, how much they could reasonably do. He kept a file on everyone. A short list was on the corner of the table, "reasonable for replacement" it read. There were four names on it. One was mine.

I felt my heart stop for an interminable moment. It was like wearing a for sale sign. I didn't understand why I felt so horrified by the idea, because I had thought about being sold many times in the past week. But imagining being sold was different from the reality of it.

Most slaves rejected from household service ended up in pools of laborers who worked mines, or farms, or construction. If they were sold on the black market, it was easy to end up in a brothel or being used for scientific testing. Other rumors suggested worse fates, but there was no real way to imagine what could happen to you after your records disappeared and according to society you did not exist.

I found my file. More than half the reports were critical: lazy, slow, stupid, different ways of saying, "I don't want her on my team." I kept paging through them in disbelief. Even the positive ones said that I did what I was told, but couldn't work with a team. The more recent the report the worse it was.

I couldn't believe it.

Aaron walked through the door and stopped short as he saw me.

"You shouldn't be in here."

I turned on him, one particularly egregious report clutched in my fist. "What is this?" I had _trusted_ him. Was this what he thought of me? "Is this what they say? This woman wasn't even with me during my shift! She disappeared and left me to make up Emma's room alone, and then she tells you that I'm lazy and can't be trusted? And you're going to sell me? Fine! Thank god! No one wants me here!"

Aaron looked a little stunned by my tirade. "It's just a recommendation. I have to do it every week."

"And they think _I'm_ the traitor," I spat. I wondered who knew that the one we had chosen to govern us saw nothing wrong with informing on us.

He reached out, as if to placate me, but his hand hesitated before it reached me. Even he couldn't bring himself to touch me. "They're not going to sell you. You've been on the list the past six times."

I stared at him blankly. "_Every week_? Every week since I _fucked_ her?"

His eyes widened. "I didn't-"

"Why was I never asked to do a report?"

"Your English…"

"My English is fine! _Yeb vas_! I can write better than this!" I threw the paper on the floor and ground it under my foot. "I want to work. I _need_ to work, but because I do the job that none of you could stomach, you won't let me?"

Aaron stumbled over his words, something about duty and reliability. I didn't listen to them.

"You don't have to be disgusted by me anymore. She doesn't want me anymore. Maybe this time they will take your recommendation and get rid of me."

"I'm not trying to keep you from working." He had regained his composure. I hadn't. "Is your back all right?"

"Better than yours I'd suppose. _You're_ still working."

His shoulders stiffened, but I couldn't read him. Was he angry? Was he afraid? He glanced toward the list and then at the floor, and I knew.

"I didn't run to her and tell. I didn't _complain_. I don't understand her, or know what she's planning, but if she were going to sell you, you'd be gone already."

"I see." Aaron looked at me and then picked the list up off the desk, scratching out my name and adding a different one at the bottom. "It's hard to believe you, since there were so many reports that agreed, but they did change drastically after… after she called you for the first time. I thought, perhaps, you were suffering from depression. I didn't want to call you on it." He looked away. "If you didn't tell her…"

"I fainted."

He looked shocked and slightly guilty at that. How could he have any guilt left after he had been punished for it so thoroughly? I could still see the imprint of a lash coming out of the collar of his shirt, marking his chest and curling over his neck.

"If you want to work, take these to the Butler." He handed me a pile of papers, the list on the top. "If I can't trust their evaluations, I will watch you myself."

I let the papers settle into my hands, not quite understanding what this meant. It wasn't what I had wanted. I wanted to be thrown away like trash. I wanted this endless disparagement to end.

But I would take what I could get.

* * *

The full-time servants lived on the floor above, but there were no staircases leading directly there. The downstairs was only accessible from the main floors, and those doors could be bolted from the outside at the entrance on our floor, on the first landing, and at the exit. The exit opened into tight corridors that led to the kitchen, the public areas, and the private areas. The public areas were riddled with doorways and hidey-holes to keep the servants available but out of sight. The private area corridor led up a second staircase and let out at the end of the hallway by the least important guest bathroom. Emma's rooms were at the opposite end of the hallway, around a corner and down another set of stairs. Slaves were not allowed on the main staircase that led up from the public rooms.

The stairs down to the servants' quarters were behind the kitchen. Slaves were not allowed on them either without an escort. The cleaning crews that worked there were on a set schedule and had guards at the doorways of whatever room they were working in.

It was easier to get out of the building from the servants quarters than from any other area (save the roof, but one would not survive the escape). It had three direct routes outside. But I didn't believe the extra security was because they were worried about escape.

In a society where there are two lower classes, one slave and one free, the most important thing to the free class is to differentiate themselves from the slaves. Because they know, that if the lines ever blur, their freedom is forfeit. That was why they made sure to guard us while we were in their quarters, and they would never stand a slave in a job that required a uniform. A uniform meant a professional, and that was something a slave could never be.

I had never been in one of the crews that cleaned the servants' quarters, so it took me a few minutes to find the stairs. I couldn't ask directions, because no one in the kitchens would meet my gaze or respond to my query. When I found it, I was surprised that there was no guard. I had expected to pass on my burden, or be escorted to the Butler, but instead I had to make my way down the dim stairwell alone, every step treading into more and more foreign territory.

The hallways were larger and better lit than the downstairs, but I didn't know where to go. The first door that was open I looked into. It was a gymnasium, and inside there was a fight going on.

* * *

The blue demon I had run into a week before was wielding a foil with his three deformed digits. He crouched and then extended in an impossibly long, amazingly graceful lunge, his forked tail in a curve behind him matching his back arm.

His opponent was a broad heavily muscled man with thick golden fur sprouting from his chest, breaking out of the collar of his uniform. He skittered backwards, trying to avoid the lunge, and fell, clumsily batting away the blade with his own weapon.

I was distracted by the fight, and only noticed the woman coming up behind me when she grabbed the back of my shirt and threw me into the gym. The papers scattered across the floor.

"Who are you? And what are you doing here?" The woman had her weapon out and it was pointed straight at my throat.

"I- I'm sorry. I'm looking for the Butler."

Her sword slashed the buttons off my shirt and it fell down my shoulders.

"Turn around."

She was looking for my brand, but it was shaming, clutching my shirt closed, and crawling on my knees until my back faced the tip of her sword. I felt the cool metal trace over the two burn marks.

"Who sent you?"

"Aaron."

"Jessica? What is happening?"

The blue demon had left his opponent on the heavily waxed floor, and bounded over.

"I caught a slave sneaking around."

The demon crouched and looked at my face. "Ja. It is my friend!"

He offered me a hand. I stared at it for a long moment, bewildered by his words. I took it. It felt soft, like the fur of a mouse. He helped me to my feet.

The woman, Jessica, was staring at me with an expression like she had tasted something disgusting. I stared at the floor.

"You had a 'K,'" she said shortly.

"Kremlin," I muttered.

"You're _that _one." She wrinkled her nose. "A woman's bad enough, but a human too." She sneered. "Deal with her, Kurt. I need to wash my hands."

The blue demon patted me on the back. "These papers are yours, ja?" He crouched and started to gather them. I quickly dropped to the floor and scrambled to collect them as quickly as possible.

He gave me his pile when they had all been picked up. "I'm sorry," I said.

"It is nothing. You helped me much. My comrades were all very disappointed when I avoided…" He pursed his lips and thought for a moment, "'being ripped a new one.' Ja?"

I glanced away. He had taken my advice. "I need to give these to the butler," I murmured.

"I will show you the way." He smiled, and offered his arm. I shook my head, glancing toward his former opponent, who was toweling off his fur and watching us suspiciously.

"Thank you," I said.

He seemed to understand what I meant, and led the way out of the gymnasium.

"I do not think I introduced myself. My name is Kurt Wagner, formerly of Berlin."

"Emily Prentiss," I said, my name sounding foreign on my tongue. "Formerly of Stoianka, near Kiev."

Kurt smiled broadly. "I am pleased to meet you."

He led me to an office in the back of the floor. A powerful-looking black man sat at the desk, frowning at a mass of paperwork. He looked up and caught sight of Kurt.

"Wagner!" he yelled. "Where are the weekly slave reports? I want you to go and bash that foreman until they're on my desk!"

"Ja, Mr. Cage. Sir. I believe I have them here." He pushed me forward and I held out the pile of papers.

Mr. Cage took them, hardly looking at me, and started paging through them. He shook his head. "As bad as I thought. Any volunteers to tell our brat of a mistress that torture is demoralizing? Didn't think so."

He was grumbling to himself, but his words were loud enough to echo off the filing cabinet across the room. I stared at him. Finally he looked up from the papers and frowned, eyeing me.

"I haven't seen you before. Your number?"

I gave it to him, and he gave me an even more intrigued look. "Really? Well, tell your foreman that I'll approve his request to rearrange the schedules, but if the mistress' rooms suffer at all from this, he'll be getting in there himself and scrubbing, all right?"

I nodded. He picked up two folders and handed me one. "This goes back to your foreman." Then he gave me the other. "This is for the cook, more blasted dinner parties, so get it to her. Immediately."

"Sir."

And suddenly I had a new job. I was Aaron's adjutant and mutant liaison. When I came back to his office, three stacks of folders in my arms from the butler, the cook and the housekeeper, after having run all over the house, looking for different people and relaying instructions, he stared at me as if I had come back from the dead. I wondered if he had expected me to get caught by the servants in their area and punished for it. Had it been a maneuver to get rid of me?

I didn't care much. I relayed all twelve messages I had been given verbally, and he groaned at the sudden weight of work. He started sorting out the responses and the instructions he needed to relay. The cleaning crews needed to ready the two best guest bedrooms. The cook needed reports from the gardens on what would be ripe by next week. The air conditioning was making strange sounds, and someone needed to go down to check on it before Mr. Cage called a technician.

"I can do it."

He gave me a long look, and then handed me the list he had been making of instructions, who to ask, who to tell.

Interacting with mutants all afternoon had made me forget that I was invisible to the humans. When I approached the head of the gardening crew and he turned away, I remembered. I didn't let him ignore me. I put my hand on his shoulder. He leapt away from me and started cursing, making the sign of the cross over and over again.

"Don't touch me demon!"

I waited for him to finish panicking. "I have a message from Aaron," I said, when he finally shut up. He was obviously surprised, but told me what I needed to know and relay on to the cook. I could feel everyone's eyes on me as I left. But for the first time in a long while they were merely shocked and curious, not baleful.


	8. Chapter 8

8

The dinner party was the first big project I was involved in. No one of great importance was coming, so we didn't have to build a dais. Anyone of the rank of duke or above is due an elevated table. But even with the lower nobility the amount of rules and honors that had to be followed was huge and incredibly complex.

All I was doing was relaying messages, but Kurt made it easy for me to interact with the other mutants. Most of them found him unobjectionable, even if they tended to patronize him. But when he introduced me most of them blinked a few times and then spoke directly with me instead of talking over me, or expecting me to listen when they didn't make eye contact. The only other slave I had ever seen them do that with was Aaron.

With my fellows, new rumors were circulating, some that I had bewitched him, others that I had offered him my _services_ when Emma had thrown me out.

Aaron only rarely brought his work into the refectory; he was more likely to skip meals. But as the party approached and more and more details needed to be sorted, he gave in, and brought his notes to work on while he ate. I was heading towards the corner to eat with JJ when he called me out in the middle of the refectory.

"Moscow! Grab a pen. I need you to take notes."

A ripple of silence spread through the room as I took the seat across from him and started writing the list of instructions he needed relayed on.

Cyrus was the one who looked at us the hardest. His back had taken a long time to heal, and he had been humiliated by being put on a lighter labor crew. He was the one most likely to wonder aloud within my hearing how much Aaron was paying for me. But everyone else saw Aaron's actions as a vote of confidence. With a few well-placed rumors that I was the one who had rejected our mistress for what she did (thanks to Jennifer, although I said nothing to support them, and I considered anyone who believed it and didn't question why I was still alive to be an idiot), it became easier to interact with my fellows. Many still shied away if I got too close, but I was back from Coventry. The silent treatment was finally over.

The only real trouble with my new job was that I was always around and available whenever a task was reported incomplete. The only tasks ever reported such involved Emma's rooms, and a cleaning crew fleeing before she returned.

The first time Aaron looked up at me pathetically, and asked, "do you think you could just have a look around? Make sure it's presentable?"

I assented and did so. A few things needed straightening. The sheets could last another day. The trash by her desk was overflowing. Someone was going to have to see to the grout on the tiles in the bath eventually, but I'd tell Aaron to put it on his list of things to do _after_ the dinner party.

I emptied the trash and realized that it was full of botched letters of invitation to the party. They were all addressed to the same person, a woman's name. I felt the blood drain from my face, but I could not have told you why. Not then. Not yet.

I rarely ran into her, and if I did, I always remembered to drop my eyes. She never looked in my direction.

* * *

The day of the party I was bringing up the pile of finely written menus to the cook. She ignored my offering, grabbed my shoulders and shook me.

"There aren't enough servers!" she squeaked. "The footmen have to manage the doors at the beginning, and there's no one to serve drinks. Your foreman needs to send me three people, trustworthy people, who won't make a spectacle of their…" she gave me a sharp look and loosed my shoulders, "of their _human-ness_, and have some idea how to act around their betters."

"But it's a uniform job," I stumbled out, still jolted by the force of the petite woman's shaking.

"I know," she gave me a sharp look. "I want face paint. As mutant as possible. The guests need to feel _comfortable."_

I ran to give Aaron these impossible directives, and he sank into his seat with a horrified expression. "Three?"

Three humans expected to be on their best behavior in a room full of mutants when we couldn't even get the cleaning crews into Emma's rooms while she was in the building? I didn't even want to consider what would happen if he chose someone who was wrong. Emma could feel their hate. What could these guests do?

"Is there anyone who you think could work with you?"

"With me?" It took a long second before I realized what he meant. "You want me-"

"Of course," he said, as if he were surprised I even asked. "But who else?"

"Me?"

He gave me a cross look. "Why do you think I need you? You don't recoil in fear when I ask you to speak to a mutant. Can you think of anyone who could hold themselves together in that situation?"

Perhaps, "Jennifer?" I offered.

He blinked. "Angel?"

JJ never had any problem with her nickname. Neither did anyone else. I nodded.

"That's three."

"It is?"

He pushed back his papers. "It will make things difficult. But I ought to be nearby if things get out of hand. Go ask the housekeeper for face paints and uniforms, and if you can, inform the heads of the crews where I'll be at the beginning of the party."

After a hastily bolted dinner I took the maquillage, uniforms, and JJ up into the worst guest bedroom's bathroom. It was private and had a mirror, unlike our room, and getting caught making up like mutants in the slave bathroom was a recipe for disaster.

Jennifer found the idea thrilling, terrifying, and was far more hyper than was comforting, so I lectured her about professionalism and the results of unprofessional behavior (i.e. death). It was pointless in the face of maquillage.

At that time, the style of dress was particularly dramatic. Looking human was practically a crime. Lip rouge was never red. Shades of blue and silver were far more popular. Large patches of color, even fake scales and fur were in style.

Before the box was even fully open, JJ was lunging for the case of shimmering gold rouge and started to smear it across her face.

"It's been so long since I've done this! My big sister taught me how."

I had been forced into dresses to go to boring grown-up parties my entire childhood, and I had been repelled by the idea of make up since it just increased the preparation time by at least a half an hour. In fact, as Jennifer skillfully manipulated the instruments, I realized that I had no ability to do this for myself.

Jennifer's mouth was glittering with gold paint, and she slowly brushed white paint across her eyelids and then outlined it with more gold. She pressed tiny stick-on stars in a cloud on one cheek, and then shoved her stool over to me and turned her back.

"Braid my hair," she instructed. The follow-up instructions informed me that she wanted tiny braids scattered throughout her hair, and then she gave me a handful of golden snakes that were meant to be clipped in. When I finished, she twisted her hair up, snakes and all, then turned towards me. She looked shockingly adult like that, and if I had passed her on the street, I would have not doubted that she was a mutant. For a moment I was afraid of her, and it was only when she laughed that I recognized her as the Jennifer I knew.

Then she grinned and said, "Your turn." And I was even more afraid.

I was very attracted to her as well, and it made me feel very uncomfortable. To a certain extent she was my little sister, and she was _thirteen_. I also didn't want to think about the fact that the more she looked like a mutant, the more attracted I was. I bit down on the feeling because this wasn't the time or place. Instead an inexplicable loneliness rose up in my chest. I had more friends, more people to interact with than I had ever had, but I couldn't help feeling un-centered and alone.

I had no opinion on what she did to me. JJ got very exited over something dark purple and the way it went with the sparkly metallic bronze, and I just hoped it would come off eventually. The third time she started to undo my hair with a new expression of gleeful insanity in her eyes I slapped her hands away and told her that we needed to make sure there wasn't anything else that needed to be done.

Aaron had made himself a pale green with frog-like spots. I was impressed. He set his hand on my arm and gave me that look that clearly said I was not going to like the next words out of his mouth.

"The mistress…"

I waved him away and started for the stairs. Sometimes I felt like the only competent person there.

When my hand touched her door, I couldn't push it open. The rough white paint under my fingers was too familiar. The fluttering of fear in my chest, _knowing_ that she was inside. I didn't want to go in. But I breathed deeply and stepped forward. Turning back was certain to have repercussions; moving ahead was only a risk.

The room was dim, the shades pulled, and the only light was coming in through the cracks. The bedside lamp that had always been the only source of illumination when I had met her there before was out. Her bedroom was empty of people, but full of ghosts.

In that room I was always on my knees.

I looked into the study, also empty, and then heard a soft noise coming from the bathroom. The light was off inside, so I hadn't thought to check there, but the door was open.

Emma was inside, staring into the shadowed mirror, touching her face. Her fingers ran down her crooked nose, molding it futilely into a better shape. She sighed, tucking her lower lip between her teeth.

She was dressed only in her underwear, a half-corset bustier, underpants and stockings, all white. Her face was made up with shimmering white paint, eyelids, lips, even the line of her cheekbones outlined. It gave her face a shell of metallic hardness, but with the half-critical half-resigned way she was watching her reflection in the mirror, she looked like a virgin bride on her wedding night.

I was still so afraid of her. I couldn't control it. It was an automatic reaction. And the fear, the physical tension and fluttering panic made it even more inexplicable that I wanted her as much as I did. I wanted to smear the colors on her face, punish her for what she had done. But perhaps all I wanted was to feel the way I had with her beneath me. With her legs wrapped around my shoulders I could destroy her. And if I were the master, I could feel free.

If the power I felt had been real rather than imagined, it would have only been more attractive.

She looked up, catching sight of me in the mirror and turned swiftly, her hands closing into fists. I could not move nor speak although I tried. I thought I was paralyzed with fear until I realized the wall of ice that had clamped down on my mind meant that she was controlling me. The flood of panic that swept through me at that realization was only more impotent than the one before. Her mouth moved as if to start the words "who are you?" and then she stopped. Her eyes flashed with recognition, but did not seem to be focused on me. The cold clench on my thoughts slipped away. And then she looked at me, cocking her head curiously, her mouth drawing into a smirk as she eyed me with an incredulous expression. Apparently whatever JJ had done was enough to make me unrecognizable at first glance and look enough like a mutant to be taken for a trespasser.

She didn't ask me why I was dressed so strangely. She just walked past me, disregarding my presence. Her dress was spread out on her bed, also white and shimmering with glossy threads woven into reflective patterns.

Put it on me. She spoke straight into my mind, not breaking the silence of the room.

My fingers were clumsy and the fastenings were complicated and difficult to reach. Sometimes I would brush against the bare skin of her back on accident. The shock of it usually made me miss a hook and would confuse me for a few moments until I could breath a few gasps of air that were not imbued with her scent and recalibrate. I expected her to jump into my mind every time, punish me for my incompetence, read the thoughts I couldn't keep from thinking, but she didn't.

I finally finished it. She didn't look at me. You can go. I sidled backwards out of the room, watching her. I couldn't stop myself from wondering if she would need me to help take it off.

I hated myself for wanting it.


	9. Chapter 9

9

Kurt bounced up to me when I came into the kitchen to get my tray.

"Emily! You look beautiful." He bowed sweepingly. "And your friend?" He looked at JJ who caught sight of his eyes and face, shrieked and ducked behind me.

"Jennifer…"

But she wouldn't shake his hand, just shook her head and stared at the ground.

I looked apologetically at Kurt. "I'm sorry."

He gave a half smile. "It's not new."

It was hard to see that look on his face. It was clear he had more right to hate us than anyone else, more experiences of violence and prejudice, but he didn't. I didn't know if I would ever understand him.

"That was rude," I told JJ when he was gone. She looked frightened and hurt by my tone.

"But he-"

"He's my friend." I snapped. "You have no right to judge him. If you treat anyone else here tonight like you did him, I won't be able to protect you. I won't _want_ to protect you."

"I'm sorry. He just looks…" She glanced after him, his tail moving like a fifth limb, his hands so inhuman and distorted. I could see the horror in her stance and in her expression. "He looks _wrong_."

I had never wanted to slap her so much, but I couldn't ruin her make up. I grabbed her shoulders, trying to restrain the force of my grip, but knowing that I was clutching her tightly. I could see the pain in her face. "People think _I'm_ wrong, for what I do. They think you're wrong because you don't have the right genes. That's why we're here. That's why your family is _dead_. So don't you dare hate him unless you hate me too. Find a better reason than the way he looks."

JJ looked like she was about to cry. I turned away from her, picking up my tray, and headed out to the lounge. "And don't wreck your maquillage."

I was on edge, had been on edge all day. Scolding Jennifer was easier than scolding myself, but I was the one who deserved it. I was out of control. I couldn't bear that. And I had to get over it. If I didn't get over it, I would not survive the night.

Serving at the party as the guests arrived was a little like watching a play. Our black uniforms with high ruffled collars made us easy to pick out as servants, even with the wild face paint that actually didn't look out of place in the company. We were like magpies among peacocks. But like the audience of a revue, we were ignored.

Jennifer stayed away from me at first. I watched her staring up at the strange people in their wild fashions and strange disfigurements with wide eyes. She never looked disgusted, but I knew from the quick fearful glances she would give me that she was working hard at it. When a man with a reptilian face and a prehensile tongue came in, I could see her take control of herself, stand straight, look professional, and walk up to offer him a drink.

He took it with his tongue.

Her jaw clenched tight, and her eyes flickered over to me, but she didn't react. I gave her a slight nod and half the tension slipped away from her.

I had meant to make her fear the guests, fear what they could do to punish her. Instead I had only made her fear me, but it seemed to be effective enough.

"Oh give me a fucking drink!" The first woman to arrive was tall, with wavy red hair and an indecently short skirt. She caught up a drink from Aaron's tray, not even giving him a glance and curled her nose as the footmen wrestled a pile of bags in, through the hall and towards the staircase. "Where's my baby sister? I want to slap her for moving to the ends of the earth and making me suffer the flight from hell."

"Adrienne." I hadn't known Emma had a sister. The woman reminded me of their father in the brutality of her expression. She kissed Emma fakely and looked her over with an appraising glance that was clearly ready to be unimpressed.

Her sullen expression didn't do much for the effect, but I couldn't have found words to criticize my mistress. I couldn't look at her though, not without remembering fastening her dress, and hating her for never looking in my direction, for ripping up a hundred people's minds because they hurt me, and then forgetting about me as if I were a toy she had lost interest in.

Adrienne smirked and put her arm around Emma's shoulders in false fraternity. "You do know plastic surgery is always an option, honey," she whispered, loud enough for me, ten feet away, to hear it.

I saw a man with a black ponytail laugh, and bristled.

I looked over to Kurt who was hoisting an oversized suitcase onto his back. "Why doesn't she do something?" I wanted to ask. He read my face, but just shook his head and started staggering up the stairs.

The crowd was astonishing, and once her sister had wandered off our mistress became someone I didn't recognize. She moved easily through the room, no trace of insecurity, speaking to everyone intimately in low voices or laughing at their attempts to be jovial.

A woman, with an exuberant grin, dressed in hot pink feathers and _tartan_, took a glass from my tray and leaned toward Emma. "Did I hear something about Elizabeth coming?" she said, laughing.

My mistress stiffened, and although it was probably invisible to everyone, I could see her discomfort. "I don't see why this is a matter of interest."

The woman smiled. "Do you think she might be… persuaded?"

"Not the time," Emma cut her off. "Radical politics should wait until everyone is drunk."

The woman raised her glass. "Are you sure you're not asking for trouble?"

"Trouble comes and goes. Legislation lasts."

I hadn't really realized that this was a court party with a political agenda, but of course it was. I knew none of the issues though, and most went over my head. When the man with the black ponytail started talking about bloodlines, and rankings being based on the purity of the genome, a woman, tall and slender, with sharp eyes and a sibilant tongue cut him off and called his ideas of nobility "_human_," which clearly meant old-fashioned and unenlightened. "Power tells," she said. "Blood is silent."

My mistress looked as if she was about to speak, but she paused and glanced toward the door. The sudden twist on her face, the eagerness and hesitance, cut more than I thought anything could. Her insecurities were supposed to belong to me.

The door opened with a footman on each side, and then the woman came in.

"Marchioness Elizabeth Braddock, Queen of Britain."

And she…

I looked away.

"Are you all right?" Kurt, carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres, hovered at my elbow. I didn't have time for his sensitivity; I didn't have enough emotional control to deal with it.

Emma greeted her too easily, the slight brush of fingers along her wrist, the sly smile, and I needed to throw up.

"When are they calling them in for dinner? God, tell me it's soon."

Kurt smiled awkwardly. Why did _everyone_ look at me like that before they told me something I didn't want to hear?

* * *

I stood behind the Marchioness as dinner was served, clenching the pitcher of wine I held, and trying to feel numb. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to give into my fury and jealousy. But if I did… I couldn't even guess how many of the guests would be able to tell. Emma would know. I almost wanted her to know, wanted to get her attention so she would stop looking at the purple-haired mutant and look at me. Even if it was just a glance, confusion, or irritation, _anything_ was fine, anything that would prove she was aware of me, that I existed.

She didn't.

But I couldn't even find a reason for why I was so jealous. I wished I could say that it was because I took pride in my work and I didn't like seeing anyone else take my place, even if I had already been fired. But that was clearly absurd. The obvious answer seemed to be that I wanted Emma, that I was jealous of this woman for having her. But it wasn't that simple. I was jealous of her for what she was, not who she had, for being a mutant, for having power and status and being worthy of my mistress' attention.

It hadn't sunk in until that day that my world, the world of this building, of the downstairs, of my mistress' bed was so small and meaningless. I could fuck her until she cried, but the moment she stepped out of the building I was as good as forgotten. My life was meaningless, and I would always be worthless because I was a human. I was furniture.

For the first time I realized that I was the one lying to myself when I said that I wasn't a whore. I was less than a whore. A whore at least was a person. She could choose to sell her services or not. It was a job description, not an identity. I wasn't even a person. If Emma wanted a relationship she would no more consider me than she would a chair.

I felt like I should have known this already. I felt naïve and childish. It took all I had not to let myself cry. I just stared at Elizabeth Braddock and wanted to be her.

I still wonder what my mother would have thought of my discovery. I finally wanted something that was beyond any conceivable realization, I wanted what she had always wanted for me, to be someone who was not forgettable, not worthless, who meant something to the world. But even the attempt to pursue that was completely barred to me.

Why hadn't I been born a mutant? The marchioness was clearly unafraid of my mistress. There was some muttering that suggested she was also a telepath. If I had that sort of strength and power I would never have to bend my head, never be afraid of what they could do to me. Instead I walked this precarious line, with no guarantees, no safety net to catch me if I put one foot wrong. And I would do such a better job at being with Emma. She wasn't even seventeen yet. She needed someone to make it easy for her, someone to hold her back if she were going too far. And it seemed so obvious that this woman didn't give a damn for her. Every move, every smile, every too intimate touch was blatantly manipulative. And Emma was a telepath! How could she not notice?

I could barely remember to keep the glasses full, and didn't pay attention at all to the flow of conversation. Half the table seemed to be telling jokes about their superiors. Dishing dirt on Erik Magnus and the Xavier brothers was entertaining, but it was done with that slightly malicious intensity that said that regardless of making them into a laughingstock, they were the embodiment of the level they desperately wanted to reach.

The other half seemed to be discussing the possibility of sponsoring a piece of legislation about the genetic testing of children. The words made my flesh crawl, and I didn't listen carefully enough to understand what the bill would entail. There was one man there, a pair of red tinted glasses on his nose, who leaned back in his chair, lifting his glass for me to refill it. He seemed against the legislation. "I have all my brats tested," he said with a sneer. "But I've never had a problem. Neither have my brothers. The Summers line breeds true."

The woman of neon pink and tartan grimaced at this comment. "Still, sometimes there are surprises. And what a fate, for a mutant to grow up as a slave."

"I don't like this retroactive citizenship garbage," said the man with the black ponytail. "A mutant with human parents should be adopted out to a real family. Slaves shouldn't be allowed uncontrolled breeding either. I sterilize all my males." He smiled. "My female guests appreciate it."

* * *

Everyone seemed drunk and useless when the coffee was finally brought in. It was nearly 2 am. I was about to pass out from exhaustion but I still couldn't help twitching every time the marchioness leaned too close to my mistress or touched her.

"What do you think?" I heard her whisper. "Is this testing thing really what it seems, or is it the human rights trash trying to find an excuse to shut down the black market?"

Emma turned her head to look at her, her eyes glassy with too much alcohol. "Does it really matter?" she murmured, and kissed her.

Kurt had to grab my elbow before I realized I was pouring coffee on my shoes.

"Well, if that's not a cue to leave," said Adrienne, with a sneer.

"To leave? Really?" asked the ponytailed man through his cigar. His eyes ran over Adrienne suggestively.

She leaned over him, her hand disappearing in his lap. "Do you follow the example you set with your slaves?"

He stiffened. "Of course not."

Adrienne sighed. "Then I suppose I'll just have to see what my little sister has to offer."

The man in red glasses laughed at him and then stood, stretching. "Well, thank you Emma. Not bad. Maybe next time you can have a _real_ party for the rest of us, and not just yourself."

People began to trickle out. Adrienne disappeared upstairs. Elizabeth stood next to my mistress in the hallway as the guests thanked her. I couldn't look. Aaron, JJ and I helped the footmen clear the table and pick up the mess that had been left behind. When the last guest had disappeared into the hall, Aaron touched my and JJ's shoulders.

"Thank you for this," he said. "You're done now."

A cleaning crew was coming in to finish up.

I let my head fall into my hands in relief. Jennifer was standing stiffly in front of me when I looked up. "Did I do okay?" she asked me.

I felt so guilty for coming down on her hard before. "You did perfectly."

She gave a weak smile. "I think they're horrible," she said. "But not because of the way they look."

"No?"

"Because of the way they talk to each other. They never say anything that isn't cruel. I can't believe its possible that they hate us more than they hate each other."

I smiled and put my hand on her drooping hairdo. "That's a good reason." Her eyes slid over me as if she were still unsure of whether I would blow up at her again. "Let's go."

I stepped out in the hall in time to see Elizabeth and my mistress walking toward the stairs. The marchioness had her arm around Emma's waist, and slowly let it slide down to cup her ass. I couldn't help the sharp surge of fury that shot through me. _Don't_ _touch her._

Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder, straight at me, all almond eyes and a wicked smile, and squeezed.


	10. Chapter 10

10

I hurried downstairs and scrubbed my face. The dark purple left odd shadows around my eyes and the sparkly bronze left flecks of glitter behind. I felt marked, and quickly changed out of the uniform, folding it to keep it neat for the laundry (although it stunk of coffee, wine and cigars). Only the cuffs of the pants actually had coffee on them, but still I felt guilty.

Had she been listening to everything I was thinking? Had she been laughing at my impotent malicious fantasies? I didn't understand why I had lost control like this. I used to always be able to feel nothing, always be able to look down and not care. My mother had been murdered in front of me, and I had bent my head and obeyed. Everything felt upside down. Where was my rightful rage when the life I had known was destroyed? And now, here, I was filled with hatred and fury because… because of what? Because of nothing? Because I had believed that my mistress' penchant for violence meant something, meant that I was important.

I wasn't important.

JJ hadn't come in yet and I lay flat on my back, wondering where she was. I was exhausted, but still buzzing with thought, most of it spawned from anger and fear.

A knock came at the door, and I knew what it meant. My night was not over yet. All of the nervous energy dissipated at once, and I was exhausted. Opening the door, I was met with Aaron's sad face.

"The mistress' sister rang the kitchens, but…"

"No one will go see what she wants?" I pulled on a slightly more presentable shirt than the vest I slept in and started for the stairs. I was beginning to doubt Aaron's post-traumatic coddling. The next slave who refused to serve a mutant deserved to be whipped. This was no way to run a household.

"Finally. I was beginning to think the bell was broken." Adrienne rolled her eyes as she lounged on the bed in a robe. She didn't bother to look at me. "I'm having some trouble sleeping. Get me some warm milk, with… oh, shot of rum." I doubted the rum would put her to sleep as she had finished off nearly a whole pitcher of wine on her own at dinner.

She looked over at me sharply. "Don't you have a voice?"

My pause had been longer than I thought. "Yes, my lady. I'll just go-"

"Wait." She frowned at me and looked at my face. "Come here." I moved a few feet closer to the bed. "You were serving at dinner tonight, weren't you?" She laughed. "Only my cheapskate of a sister would dare to pass off slaves as mutants."

She stood and reached toward me. Her fingers brushed against my shirt and something happened. Her eyes widened.

"You're the slut my daddy bought." Adrienne lifted my chin and inspected my face, then sneered and looked away. "Only the best for daddy's favorite." She laughed, mockingly, and I couldn't tell whether she was mocking Emma or me more. "Doesn't really matter what you look like though, as long as you're good at what you do. Tell me," she smiled cruelly, "Are you on reserve, or does she loan you out to the guests?"

I shouldn't have been so surprised by the suggestion. The man with the black ponytail had insinuated enough.

For a moment I thought of the dark refectory, the limp bodies, and I wondered if my mistress would be angry if someone else touched me. But this was her sister. She hadn't even snapped back when she had been personally insulted. She wouldn't do anything. And worse, I doubted she would care. It wasn't as if she were alone tonight.

Adrienne stripped off her robe. In some ways her body was more beautiful than Emma's. She was lush where my mistress was narrow. Her breasts full and heavy, her hips smooth and curved. I couldn't do it. I stared at her crotch, trying to imagine eating her out. The thought made me sick. She was cruel and a bully.

But what right did I have to complain? I was furniture.

I was sick of being furniture.

"Fetch my drink, and then I'll give you a ride. I can't say I care much for women… at all. But from what I saw, you're pretty good with your mouth."

I fled the room, desperate for this reprieve. What had she seen? I pulled the shirt out and looked at it. It was just a shirt. It was… the one I had taken off and folded before serving Emma the first time. Had she seen that? Was that even possible?

The thought make my stomach twist like a shriveling worm.

I stumbled into the kitchen. "The mistress' sister wants warm milk with rum."

The cook laughed. "I could tell we hadn't served enough hard liquor. Rule of thumb for the Frost family: if it isn't 80 proof, it isn't alcohol."

Kurt saw me as he came in from rearranging the chairs and tables that had been moved for the party. "Ach, Emily, you are still working?"

I stared at the drink in my hand, with its light dusting of cinnamon. "Kurt. Do you know where I could find a sedative? Something that works fast?"

He looked at me, confused, with a slight suspicion in his eyes. I looked away. I wasn't going to be weak in front of him. He slipped away and came back almost immediately with two white capsules. "Versed," he said. "Mr. Cage takes them if he can't get to sleep."

It was a stupid idea. If she could see what had happened around the _shirt_ I was wearing, the moment she touched the mug, she would know. I kept the capsules clenched in my guilty fist. She would rip me apart. She wasn't someone who would wait for justice, not that it would be slow in coming. A slave drugging a mutant was a sign of impending disaster. News of it would give the humans a feeling they could fight back. Any mutant who discovered a slave with even the intent of harming or incapacitating a mutant, was obligated to kill them on site.

I was an idiot. I would fuck her if I had to. Could it really be worse than Emma? It was all the same, if I was used by one person or another. That was what I was there for. That was what her father had bought me for. I cast the pills into a potted plant.

I would never get the dirt off of me, but it was already ground in too deeply to rub away.

* * *

Adrienne took the drink and seemed to notice nothing. She gave me a sly look, but drank the milk without hesitation. I winced. I should have done it.

"This party was a riot, wasn't it?" Adrienne laughed. "Little Emma really needs to figure out which team she's playing for, because honestly, Marquis Shaw and Doña Garcia in the same room? It's lucky she made certain everyone was drunk very quickly, or there could have been a fight."

I stared at her blankly. Was she expecting me to comment?

She looked at me, frowning. "What have you been doing in these past ten months? Besides fucking my sister. Don't you remember what my father told you? You're supposed to be finding out what she's doing."

I had forgotten. "I… I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for, my lady."

Adrienne rolled her eyes. "Your lucky my father isn't here. If you're that much of an idiot when he comes for her birthday, he won't be pleased. Look, there's a rumor that a cabal of pro-human rights are getting more powerful in the capitol. If she even goes near them, daddy's bringing her home. That's what you need to watch out for."

I frowned. "I don't think she _would_ be interested in that."

Adrienne snorted. "You don't know what she did to daddy's project. These idiots and their egalitarian society pipe dreams are fucking dangerous."

"It sounds like suicide," I said. My habit of speaking without thinking was really starting to get out of hand.

Adrienne cocked her head and seemed to encourage me to go on.

"If they were successful… if they abolished slavery, within this generation, after proving that mutants have the capacity to dominate humans, that they truly are a danger to individuals, nations, laws, how could the humans let them live? It's like saying that we want an egalitarian society with tigers, so we let them out of their pens. And yes, we're smarter and more technologically sophisticated than tigers, but they're hungry and have been held captive for years. Eventually, we'll be walking down a dark alley, and we won't come out the other side."

Adrienne gave an odd half smile. "Perhaps you're not as much of an idiot as I thought you were."

I looked down. I had said too much.

"Daddy would be a fool to trust you." Her grin was like a cat's. "I don't think I'll mention that to him. You have a snake's tongue. I hope baby sis likes the way that feels between her legs, because I wouldn't be surprised if you finished with a knife in her gut."

I was shocked by her words. Did I read like a traitor to both sides? But a family that planted spies to watch each other probably didn't have much practice with believing someone to be loyal. Not that I was loyal.

Somehow I needed to keep that feeling. Perhaps I would lie to Baron Frost, but if I did, it wouldn't be for his daughter's sake. I had done enough for her. I spent my days making sure her house ran smoothly. I had taken a beating because she wanted me to look after her at night as well. I had taken her curses and her slap when she blamed me for feeling the fear that she had caused. I was not about to promise anyone my loyalty if it meant that I was giving up my one chance at autonomous action.

As a slave, my very words were prescribed, but as a spy I could say what I pleased. I let that thought buoy me, and the relief when Adrienne sent me away unused only increased my self-importance. (She didn't want my teeth near anything vulnerable, she said with a laugh. And either way, it was late, and her husband would be waiting for her when she went home.)

The feeling lasted for exactly two steps out the door.

"Oi, you. Show me to my room."


	11. Chapter 11

11

I turned. The marchioness was there, half wrapped in an open shirt. I could scent sex on the air. I flashed through about half a dozen emotions before I remembered that I didn't care. But my mouth moved faster than my brain.

"You're not staying with…"

I cursed myself. Would I ever remember how to hold my tongue?

Elizabeth gave me a sharp look. "I don't _sleep_ with people," she said disgustedly. "Why would you…" Then she tipped her head and _looked_ at me. Her eyes seemed to glow.

And suddenly there were rough straps restraining my mind. The marchioness appeared in the midst of my thoughts in purple leather armor, her gaze cruel. I couldn't think as she summoned images from my memories.

When she found one and brought it out, I would live it all over again. When people say it was like a dream, they mean it was foggy and muddled and confusing, but that's only the memory of a dream. While you're dreaming, you can't tell the difference between it and reality. That was what this was like. I couldn't tell myself it wasn't true, because it was happening, just like the first time.

She seemed to have an unerring instinct for every miserable memory I had, every moment of loss or loneliness. She started when I was a child, bringing back that sharp, vicious humiliation that I had lived with nearly every day, because I was always doing something wrong. She reminded me of the loss of my best friend, her death, when I was seven, my father leaving the next year, the fights and painful dinners, his funeral, the move to Kiev, ostracization by my peers, that sickening feeling of being wrong, being afraid, when I realized what I wanted… who I wanted.

I could feel the marchioness' glee as she encountered the next parts, all the things I have already told, the sudden change, the fall from status as my mother lost her job when her government fell, sitting in city hall, begging for asylum, "asylum from the _Russians,_" my mother cursed with incredulity, her madness, my feelings of complete and utter disorientation, and then her death. I had tried so hard to lock away the feelings I had had on the train and in the prison camps, and none of them stood out in my memories, but with Elizabeth's interference I was lost again in the unrelenting fear, horror, pain, and hunger. If there had been some moment of kindness, some moment of sacrifice that I could recall, I might, perhaps, have been able to believe in the nobility of the human spirit. But all that I could see was futile shows of resistance, ending in suicide by mutant, and forcing us to ride with the vile humors exuding from the rotting corpses piled up against the wall, selfishness, and violence as the strong took what little food there was to be had from the weak.

The marchioness sped through most of what came after. She couldn't find any sites of hot burning emotion. Had I truly been that numb? But of course I had. Horrors surrounded me on every side, moving corpses, mopping blood, but the worst I had felt was irritation at someone knocking my bucket over.

I had been dead inside, until now, until I woke up in my mistress' bed and for a moment was able to forget everything that had happened.

Oh, you are a piece of work. She laughed as she bathed in the nets of my tangled feelings. She relished my pain as I was beaten. She stroked my rage and teased my desire until I was a wreck, miserable and emotionally exhausted.

You really want to be me? How sweet. She batted her eyelashes at my restrained avatar.

I never want to be you. Get out. Get out of my head. I fought against the bonds, futilely, weakly. I didn't know how. I couldn't even find a way to make them tense. I was utterly at her mercy, and it was clear that was something she lacked.

I cried. Some little connection to my physical body told me that tears were running out of my eyes, but inside my mind, my avatar cracked from the inside like ice. I was broken.

How… how can you do this to me? Emma said I have good shields.

Elizabeth laughed in my avatar's face. That's bullshit. You don't even have real shields. You just don't broadcast all your thoughts around all the time. You don't control them. Anyone with a week of training and any aptitude for mental control could do the same.

But she said…

She traced her finger down my nose and I felt it, but in a different way than I expected. I flinched, and my mental body responded, pulling at the bonds. Emma's a crap telepath. She's got the raw power but she hasn't trained it. Compared to someone who knows what they're doing, she's weak.

Don't say-

God, you are pathetic. You and your little case of Stockholm Syndrome. Siding with her won't protect you, love, not when she's making so many mistakes. Let her know, someone who backs both horses loses at least once every race.

I didn't believe it, but both the marchioness and Adrienne seemed to believe that Emma had a tendency to turn dangerously left. But how on earth could someone who murdered a man negligently, simply because she did not care, ever consider humans important enough to take a political stand for?

She stole that thought as I had it, and laughed at me again. She doesn't, I checked. She thinks nothing of humans, feels nothing but disdain for their weakness, and anger for what she suffered at their hands. She thinks nothing of you. You do not even exist in her head.

I couldn't help the flare of anger. I didn't believe her. I so blatantly could not believe her, although I had been telling myself the same thing. There was no way to hide it, no need to. I blasted it at her. How dare you-

She smirked as the wave crested. You're so desperate to mean something to her, aren't you? Can't you just deal with the fact that you are an object used for sex? She showed me my memory of the first time, let me hear the lies I told myself. Yes, she was nervous. It was her first time. You wanted to take responsibility for that, teach her. But you failed at training her properly. She never touched you. She never even considered it. Emma got angry because her servants scratched her toy, not because it was _you_. There is no _you_ to her, do you understand that yet?

I couldn't look at her. I didn't want to face that. I wanted to believe it wasn't true. Elizabeth caressed my avatar's face and made me look at her. You are such a fool to want her. She has no idea of what to do with a woman. I'll blame you for it. You're the one who taught her to be selfish in bed.

What?

I could see it. I could see Emma wanting her, kissing her, like she would never _ever_ kiss me, pulling her down onto the bed, wanting to touch, wanting to be touched.

Oh, she gave it her best shot. But the girl had no idea what she was doing. Not like you. She played with one of my memories, one of my favorites, of Emma breaking, giving her body, her response, her pleasure up to me. But you were trained.

Trained? Had Irina prepared me for that as well? I recalled her pressing down on my head, hissing instructions. My mouth and fingers slick with her come, she sometimes petted my hair. But it was Elizabeth petting my hair. Don't worry. I'm sure you were satisfactory. It's hard to make an ex-KGB scream.

And then suddenly I was in Elizabeth's memories, Emma's bedroom, my mistress sitting up, naked, in her bed and looking at us.

"I'm done." It was Elizabeth's voice, as we pulled on the shirt.

"But-"

"Take my advice and get some practice. Girls as bad as you don't get to come."

The look on her face… I was grateful that Elizabeth walked out without looking back.

The marchioness laughed at me. It would only take a little to finish her off. I bet she'd spread her legs for you this time, even if you wanted to kill her as much as you do me right now. She petted my face. I'd let you. In fact, I could make you do it. Would you like that? Would you like me to put a compulsion in your head to make you lick me until I came? I could make you need to service everyone in this building. You'd wake her sister up with your tongue in her pussy, then you'd go and suck off your boss until he came on your face, and then that blue boy. I wonder if is cock is as pointy as his tail. And then you'd go down on that little roommate of yours, and she'd whimper and flail and ask you what you were doing-

Get out! Get _out! _ I threw myself against the bonds and they bent, and I strained against them. I jerked my shoulder and my hand was free. I slapped her. It wasn't a physical slap, and yet it hurt my hand as if it were. It must have hurt her too, for she looked at me, with fire in her eyes.

The straps tightened around my shoulders. One wrapped around my neck like a snake and choked me. "Learn your place, _human_. If you want to betray your race for _cuddles, _go ahead, but don't think that you're one of us. Don't ever, _ever,_ make that mistake.

The screaming pain in my head was too much to bear. I could see flashes of the hallway, flashes of inside my mind, starbursts and pulsing veins, and then there was only darkness.


	12. Chapter 12

12

"You're awake."

"God, please don't talk." I buried my head underneath the pillow, my splitting headache pounding in my ears. The pillow smelled wrong.

The voice had been Aaron's, I was in his bed.

I sat up, flinching at the light that sent electrical spider webs across my field of vision. "What am I doing here?"

He wouldn't look at me. His back was stiff and I could see the slight downward curve of his mouth, already wearing lines into his face. He would look old before his time with the strain of his position. "Angel was worried when you didn't return. I found you in the hallway."

I shuddered. The pain of trying to think was almost overwhelming, but I knew at least that what the marchioness had done to me was less than she had threatened. I couldn't look at Aaron after what she had said. A trickle of wrongness ran down my spine.

"Why did you put me here?" I asked. I couldn't trust my mind or my memories. Had I done something that I couldn't remember? "Why didn't you take me back to my room?" I stared at him through my splayed fingers that tried to guard my eyes from the light.

"I just thought… I didn't want to disturb…"

His awkward inability to explain himself terrified me, and I hated what was written on his face.

"_What did I do_?"

"You were unconscious." He seemed bewildered by my question, and I knew it was worse than I had thought.

I hadn't done anything. Elizabeth hadn't made me do anything. My reputation hung by a thread as it was. How dare he do this to me? I stiffened in his bed, my hands clenching tightly around crumpled sheets.

"You're my bossand that is _all_! I don't _like_ you." I pulled in air through my nose. And slipped out, my bare feet chilled on the cool floor. "How could I, after what you did to me, after what you believed of me? Don't you dare make me a whore."

I fled his room, not looking at his face. I knew he would be desperate and apologetic, but I had no way of knowing who saw him carrying me into his room. I had no idea what effect this would have. When you had something to lose there was so much more to fear. I couldn't forgive him for not realizing what the consequences of his actions could be.

Later I would realize that none of it was his fault. It was my own action, my own mistakes that led me down that path. And it was my own desires, or lack of desire, that betrayed me.

I tried to be sure no one saw me leaving Aaron's room, but Cyrus was coming around the corner as I ran out. He stepped aside, watching me, and stroking his russet mustachio. I never liked the look in his eyes.

* * *

The migraine stayed with me for three days.

I was angry and irritable, light and sound sensitive, and I just wanted to lie in my room and die.

The only person I could stand to be around was Kurt, because he spoke softly and didn't bump into _everything_. I heard second-hand about the marchioness' departure and Emma's subsequent blow out with her sister who left in a huff to no one's displeasure.

Apparently someone had seen Aaron carrying me down the stairs at least, because there was now a rumor going around that Adrienne had attacked me, and the slaves were more frightened of coming in contact with mutants than ever. Even the kitchen slaves cowered from the cook, whose mutant ability had more to do with never ever mistaking the amount of salt a recipe needed than anything offensive.

But for the first time they weren't completely off base. I was just glad Elizabeth was gone. I truly knew what to fear, and I would be more skittish around her than the cleaning crews were around Emma.

After having been attacked by a telepath, after knowing what it could be like, discovering what they had the ability to do, I still did not know how I would react around Emma. Would I fear her for what she could do? Or would I trust her because she hadn't done it, not to me at least?

She hadn't been home much, at the court at all hours, coming back late and then staying in her office on the phone. I didn't know what it was about. I didn't really want to know. With the threat of Baron Frost's visit hanging over me, I felt that the more I knew, the more risk I was taking.

Kurt was the one who told me that the marchioness had left, and my relief was visible even though my headache was still clinging. It had been fading in intensity a bit every day, so I hoped that either it would go away, or I would get used to it.

I told him what had happened, and how it hurt me physically, but he was too sensitive to my moods to be passed off by that. He touched my arm and looked at me, worry vivid on his face. I couldn't help but admit what else the marchioness' attack had done to me.

"I just felt so helpless. I didn't know how to fight…" I looked down at the floor. "I don't know how to deflect. I can school my face and my body language. I can make myself as good as invisible to someone who is only looking with his eyes. But I don't know how to school my mind. Not when I really do hate someone."

Kurt frowned and considered this pensively as he patted my shoulder in some semblance of comfort. "I am sure there is a law against it, but I could teach you some techniques to strengthen your shields. Among mutants it is considered polite to have a little restraint on your thoughts. I do not see why humans should be forced to be impolite, ja?"

That was when the lessons started. We called them meditation lessons so that no one would suspect, and oddly enough, many of the techniques were based on meditative practices. And the skills are all based on abilities gained through meditation. Even breathing practice, trying to stay focused on just one moment of your breath, say, when it passes through your nostrils, for ten breaths without thinking of anything else, is a difficult skill to master. But that was only the beginning. Going about my everyday tasks, I practiced being aware of my breath, of how I walked, how I placed my feet. But the ultimate goal is being aware of your own mind. You never just exist; you are always aware of your own thoughts, aware of your emotions, but not overwhelmed by them. Once you have built that second level of rational thought, and cemented it in place, you work on hardening it. It isn't like building a wall. It's more like weaving a basket, weaving yourself inside a basket. First you must contain yourself, and then you can work on shutting others out.

Kurt said that most people never got beyond the self-containment. I thought I had once been good at that, but recently I had lost control. He said numbness was different than self-awareness.

The one thing that made this particularly challenging was that he was not a telepath, so I had no way of knowing whether or not it was working. But I remembered how it had felt when I had gained enough strength to pull against the bonds, to strike her. I weaved for hours in my imagination, and knew it would not be effective. But finally I found that feeling again and when I pulled my weave tight it felt solid. It existed, not in my memory or my imagination, but in my consciousness.

* * *

I had only finished my second lesson, and was attempting to concentrate on breathing as I walked, when Aaron called to me in the middle of the refectory. I was still offended that he had brought me to his room (put me in his _bed_), and I hesitated. He should not have approached me there. He should have found somewhere private to have such a conversation, but he didn't. He pulled me to the side and spoke quietly, but everyone was watching.

"Emily."

I cringed to hear my name out of his mouth. It sounded wrong and foreign, and it said everything I did not want to hear.

"You need to listen to me!" he hissed sharply at me. "You're right. No one trusts you because you… you served her willingly. But if it was seen that-"

"You _disgust _me." I knew better than to shout it, but I shouldn't have said it at all.

I had a hundred reasons for feeling that way. Some would say he was pretty enough. I would say he looked like me. Some would say he was a trustworthy and fair man. I saw someone who whipped a woman and then cried his apologies to be little more than a hypocrite.

I knew him well by now. I knew he tried to be fair. He tried to be kind. In his position it would never be easy, and that was admirable as well, but trying to manipulate me this way was low.

"If you want me, if you care for me, just say it, and let me accept and reject you by my own will. You do not have the right to force me."

"It's for your sake-"

"Don't do me favors!"

"I do think it would be good, not just look good," he said awkwardly. "I respect your competence, and I rely on your fearlessness, and I would be happy to…"

It wasn't as if I even knew how a declaration of affection was supposed to go, but I was disappointed with his.

"I already said I don't want you." That was too sharp and too loud, and he stepped up to me and grabbed my arm.

"Don't do this. They're all watching you. What will they think?"

I jerked my arm from his grip. "You may be my boss, but you cannot make me do this."

Emma could make me do this, had made me. Her sister could have. The marchioness could have. But Aaron had no power over me anymore. "If you try to force me, I can speak with Mr. Cage. I can go over your head."

Mr. Cage knew my number off by heart. The cook and the housekeeper both called for me specifically (and by name, thanks to Kurt's introductions). I had power.

It was only later that I would realize that this was the most inappropriate thing I could ever have said in the refectory. It was foolish, and it nearly killed me.

* * *

I wasn't speaking to Aaron except for terse exchanges of instructions, and he hadn't asked me to fill in the menial chores that the slaves were too afraid to do for a few days, so I was surprised when he knocked on my door, one night, late, past curfew.

His eyes were always cold when he looked at me now. "Your mistress needs assistance. Bring a mop and a bucket."

The 'your mistress' was new, and bit into me like the lash. It wasn't as if she had called for me. It wasn't as if I had even seen her in the past week. She was busy, and I was kept running errands in the working part of the house.

I had no idea what had happened.

It was the footman Jessica who told me. She stopped me in the hall on the way to my mistress' room. Her leather gloves and the sweat on her face suggested that she had been the one to drive her home. She put her hand on my shoulder, which was a surprise, because she had always been disgusted by me, for multiple reasons.

"Don't bother her," she said harshly, looking me in the eyes. "You go in there, clean, and get out. Don't even look at her. She's been shamed enough today."

My eyes widened. "What happened?"

Jessica wrinkled her nose, and pulled her hand from me as if I burnt. "It's none of your business."

That was true enough. I looked away and made to start down the hall again. But her voice made me pause.

"You know she's been working nonstop. She was putting together a bill, trying to get support for it." Jessica shook her head. "That bitch got up today, rescinded her support, and drove it into the ground."

I closed my eyes. It wasn't difficult to guess who she meant by 'that bitch.' If I had to choose an epithet for the marchioness, I would have selected the same one.

It was the scent that tipped me off when I stepped into the dim room, of what my task was going to be. Liquor and vomit had never seemed that distinct from each other, but the blend was still better than vomit and blood.

Emma was sprawled across her bed, still dressed, making little moaning noises of discomfort.

I tackled the bathroom first, as that was the worst of it. Her office was a disaster as well though. It looked like she had raged through it and ripped up her files. I just put most of it in a pile. It wasn't my job to decide what she should keep and what she should discard.

The trouble was, Emma herself smelled like a bar. Jessica might want to protect her, but I was not impressed by this method of dealing with her problems. From the cook's previous comment about her sister's drinking habits, I assumed it was a familial issue, but if so, it was even less excusable. One should attempt to overcome one's family's failings, not imitate them.

I finished tidying up her room, but I didn't feel comfortable leaving her like that. She didn't have any signs of alcohol poisoning, but she was coughing every once in a while, and would grimace afterwards, like there was a bad taste in her throat. She mumbled for water, and I brought her some. She didn't look at me or seem to wonder where the water came from, but she hardly opened her eyes, just enough to make a weak flail for the glass and spill on herself.

I sat on the edge of the bed as she drank and then tried to find the side table with the glass without opening her eyes.

"I could have told you she was only trying to manipulate you," I said, as I guided her hand towards the table. Emma put the pillow over her head and turned away from me. "You didn't ask me." I shook my head. "No reason to ask me."

I wrinkled my nose when she turned, because it was clear the sheets hadn't been changed in a while, and she had been sick enough that her clothes stunk.

"You can't sleep like this."

She curled into herself, turning away from me, and muttered something like, "go away."

I muscled her out of the bed and into the bathroom. She complained like a sleepy child, but didn't resist.

"I don't know what your legislation was about, but it wasn't worth this. _She_ wasn't worth this."

I stripped her. She was more pliant than when I was offering her sex, and I shoved her into the shower without resistance. She shrieked when the water hit her, but it warmed up quickly, and she stood there, swaying slightly on her feet. I wasn't entirely certain if she was awake, but I left her there and went to change the sheets on her bed and find something clean for her to wear.

She hadn't washed at all when I got back, so I made sure her hair was clean. This required me getting half into the shower with her, so I was mostly drenched by the time she was suitably hygienic.

"You need to pay attention to the effects your actions have on other people. For a telepath you aren't very sensitive."

I dried her off and dressed her. "Wallowing is not an effective way of dealing with your problems," I scolded her. "And what idiot took you drinking?"

She leaned weakly into my shoulder, mumbling incomprehensible half responses to my criticisms, until I put her into her clean bed. She wasn't coughing anymore and looked much more comfortable. I, on the other hand, was damp and sweaty.

I was about to leave and glanced back, standing at the door. Her wet hair was sticking to her face and the pillow and she seemed to have already fallen asleep.

I hadn't been afraid of her for a moment. I hadn't even thought of it. How could you be afraid of someone so undeniably human, mutant powers or not?

"You deserve better than her," I said quietly. "I can't say I'm a better option, because honestly, I'm not. But you deserve better because you _are_ better." I shook my head. What evidence did I have for that? The whole downstairs would disagree with me. "Maybe not _are_, but can be. I believe that," I frowned. "For no good reason. But I believe it."

"Fuck off," Emma mumbled and pulled the pillow over her head."

* * *


	13. Chapter 13

13: Pride

She didn't remember it, I think. She didn't seem to notice me. In fact she looked in my direction less than she had before. I thought for a moment that she might be trying to avoid my gaze, but I never caught her turning away.

I don't know whether Jessica said something, or my meditation lessons with Kurt had become an issue, but I felt that the mutants were treating me with more reserve than they used to. The humans weren't shunning me like they had, but there was an uneasy feeling in the downstairs. Even my relationship with Jennifer was becoming strained. She wouldn't come with me if I mentioned I was going to spend time with Kurt. She was still afraid of him, and beginning to resent me for my disappointment. She had other friends whom she was spending more time with, and although they didn't reject me, there was a slight hesitance in the way they treated me, as if they were unsure of what my reactions would be to certain things they said.

Aaron sometimes sent his orders to me through an intermediary, but he was professional, and didn't hold my ill-considered outburst against me in our working relationship. But I no longer felt that I had to fend off his attempts at friendship. I did not expect to be as unhappy about that as I was. But it was always difficult when a little bit of what you were comfortable with was taken away. Even if he had continued trying, it wouldn't have been the same, now that I knew he was not merely interested in a friendly interaction.

The alienation was not as bad as it had been, but I was still so used to being ignored, that when I was tidying the parlor, and someone spoke, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the comment was about me. The content also did not assist me.

"She's pretty," said the woman, round and blonde. I remembered her from the party, tartan and electric pink feathers. Today she was more conservatively attired in florals, drinking tea with my mistress. The words registered with me, but it took a long moment before I realized that there was no one she could be speaking about aside from me. I looked up, and saw Emma's eyes flinch away from me. The woman was also peering at me through her glasses, over her cup of tea, but she was just examining my body, not interested in meeting my eyes.

"You think so?" asked Emma boredly. "Do you want her?"

I flinched. The woman noticed. Her expression turned curious and considering. She looked over to my mistress.

"I'm not the one who's always complaining about my inability to get laid."

Emma glanced over at me again, but her eyes were hard. They seemed to shove me towards the door. "I had her a few times," my mistress said flatly. "It got boring. I wanted to be with a real person."

I walked out and shut the door a little too forcefully. I couldn't listen to that. I couldn't hear her lie about me, if it _had_ been a lie. I slumped back against the door.

"A real person? Did you _seriously_-"

"Shut up, Garcia." Emma snapped at her. "I'm listening to your shit but that doesn't mean I'm going to drink the fucking kool-aid."

"Just tell me. When you say boring, did you mean you felt guilty? Did you hate yourself for taking something from someone who couldn't tell you no?"

"No. I'm not _Scott_. I didn't force her to do anything." There was a short pause. "Maybe it's boring not because slaves can't tell you no, but because they can't tell you yes. They can't give you anything, because you already own everything worth having. And they don't have the strength to take anything away."

"They need protection."

My mistress's response was derisive. "You can't protect a piece of property from its owner. You get annoyed with me for saying that they aren't real people, but anyone you have to protect isn't a real person. When you make choices for someone else, they can never be real."

"That's why the children are different?"

"No one's saying idiotic things about them not needing protection."

"They just vote that way." I flinched at that remark, how would Emma respond to a reminder of that indignity.

Emma sounded tired. "Our best argument is still that some of them could be mutants. If we can find just one that tests positive, it's rape, kidnapping, and procurement. We can use that to start shutting the rings down, while they're still arguing about legislation."

"I'm glad you're on our side."

"I'm _not_. I told you. Children are different."

"Children grow up to become adults."

"Human children grow up to be human adults. The purges are over. They get to _live_. What more should they want out of life? Freedom? It means nothing. None of us are free."

* * *

It was a lot of information to absorb at once. But it matched with what JJ had told me. How long had she been fighting for this? Since she was thirteen, fourteen? It was uncharitable, but I wondered what must have happened for her to be drawn out of her natural tendency towards selfishness.

But what would happen to a telepath during a massacre?

It was inadvertent, but I ended up alone with her for a moment. She was reading in the library, draped over the couch, the book shading her eyes, and I was taking out the trash. She heard me come in, and lifted the book, shooting me a tense glare. I ignored her and went about my business. She dropped the book back over her eyes and ignored me in turn.

I was about to step out the door, when I thought of something, and stopped.

"I'm not afraid of you anymore," I said.

The book thumped on the floor. I dared a glance and met an ugly snarl. "Who the fuck are you?" she spat.

I didn't react, just shouldered my burden and walked away.

Three days later she called for me again.

* * *

It was different this time, knowing she had been with someone else, knowing that I had basically asked for this. We were both more stiff and awkward than the first time.

"I'm willing to give you another chance," she said, blandly, like I had somehow failed a trial period for my employment. I supposed I must have, at least according to the marchioness. But it made me want to laugh, and it took all I had to keep it down.

I stopped wanting to laugh when she flinched away from my touch.

She had been hesitant before, embarrassed, but she had never been afraid. Was this what Elizabeth had done to her? I bent my head.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I murmured into her chest, meaning more than physically. Her eyes slid over me. I had settled on my knees, straddling her lap, and she seemed to be inching away. She closed her eyes, biting her lower lip. "You promise?" she whispered, nearly inaudibly.

I gently kissed the line of her collarbone. "I promise."

Afterwards she didn't seem to want me to stay, but I made no motions towards leaving. I was waiting for her to send me away, but she didn't seem to want to do that either. She lay still and tense on the other side of the bed, and then she spoke.

"You heard us, didn't you? About the children. You listened."

"I already knew," I told her.

She looked at me, confusion written on her face.

"Jennifer told me. About how you knocked the guards unconscious and took them away from there."

Emma's body was stiff and unyielding. She lay silently. I worried I had said too much and was about to be thrown out again. But then she spoke to the ceiling.

"My father was the one who had set it up. I found his files. I had to pretend I had just stumbled upon it. That was the only house I could get to. They were the only ones… It didn't matter what I did. They just ended up working for one person, rather than anyone who came through the door."

"It's better. At least for her, it's better."

Emma rolled on her side and looked at me, frowning slightly. "Tell me your name again. I've forgotten."

I couldn't do anything but laugh.

* * *

The downstairs seemed to intuit the change before I even made it back the next morning. No one questioned me when I wasn't around for the earliest shifts. I didn't miss them often though. Even when I stayed, I would wake up at my usual time and slip out unnoticed. I preferred that to having my mistress awake to find me still there.

The news seemed to spread among the mutants just as quickly. A few would give me tips, if she was in a certain mood they knew she would call for me, and the footmen would give me a heads up so I could prepare. Some did it with a laugh. Jessica derisively, Kurt earnestly.

Sometimes I wore the dress her father had brought me in when I went to her room at night. No one ever stopped me then, it being patently obvious what my purpose and destination were. I wore nothing underneath it. As Emma grew more comfortable with what we were doing, she would let herself touch me, her hands sliding up the backs of my thighs, grasping for purchase, fingers digging into my shoulders or back. When we lay together afterwards her arms would brush against my breasts, making it even harder to stay still.

Often it was torture to be kept there, pressed against her sweaty sated body, and keep my hand from sliding down between my legs and providing some relief. If she fell asleep on top of me, sometimes I would, moving slowly and staying quiet so as not to wake her. It was almost easier to finish trapped there, encased in her warmth and her scent, than it was to bring myself off alone in my own narrow bed. I had to be just as quiet there, because I shared my room with JJ, and was not interested in explaining what I was doing if she woke up and noticed.

One night when I wore that dress she managed to tangle our legs together so her knee was between mine. She was speaking, complaining about court or something, but I could not focus on what she was saying because her hand was stroking down my stomach, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in my dress, which had ridden up over my hips. Then, unexpectedly, her hand slipped between my legs. We both stiffened at the touch, but she did not remove her hand.

"Is this…" she asked, her fingers brushing against me again. I closed my eyes.

"Please."

Her fingers touched me with a gentle curiosity, stroking over hot, swollen flesh, slipping inside, thick wetness clinging to them. Sliding back and forth, they found my clit and rubbed circles around it. I buried my face into the pillow, trying not to cry out. But her touch grew more insistent and I panted, rocking my hips against her hand until I came.

She settled into a self-satisfied quiet after that, and I lay still and wide-awake. I was unbelievably ashamed of myself. When I was certain she was asleep, I left. I went up onto the roof and sat by the edge, next to the cabbages, and wallowed in it.

I wanted to tell myself that it was all right. The marchioness had said as much, it was part of my job to teach her how to do what I did for her. But that sounded more and more hollow as I repeated it. I wasn't working. I was taking advantage. Sleeping in her bed, encouraging her to touch me, it was taking advantage of my position and it felt wrong.

It would have been difficult to explain to Jennifer, trying to state the difference between the gardeners swiping a few choice vegetables and myself begging my mistress to fuck me. But that was the difference right there. I wasn't taking anything from her, I was giving her power over one of the few things I had left, my pleasure, and she _knew _it. That was the worst part. I had begged for it. I had given up whatever last remnant of self-respect I had, for sex.

Now that I had I given her that as well, what did I have left?

* * *

The next time she called for me, I didn't want her to touch me. I pushed down on her wrists, pinning them to the bed, and kept on pushing them away if she tried to hold on to my shoulder, or slip her hand into my hair. I was doing my job and didn't need the distraction.

It was harder.

I suppose I just hadn't noticed how much I already had to give to her to do this job. Not hating her wasn't quite enough. I had to want her, at least a little bit.

I felt her get frustrated with my not allowing her to touch me. Finally she had had enough, pulled me up, and pushed me back onto the bed. I didn't resist, just went limp. And she left me alone.

I wasn't sure what she wanted from me. She stopped me when I tried to leave, and curled absently into my back. I was tense, almost terrified, that she was going to try to touch me. I had decided not to react. If she wanted it, I would let her, but I wouldn't beg, I wouldn't even give her permission. If she wanted this, she would have to take it.

She didn't.

One of her arms pressed against my breasts and I could feel her even breathing against my neck. It was calm and regular and finally I was sure she was asleep. I started to move my hand, but her fingers slid around my wrist and held me still. They drifted teasingly over my palm and tangled with mine.

She knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted me to beg. I wasn't going to.

The stalemate lasted until we both fell asleep.

* * *


	14. Chapter 14

14: Lust

No one had cleaned the grout in Emma's bathroom for months. I had specifically put in on Aaron's list to be done immediately after the party. Had it been done? No. When I complained to Aaron he just looked at me coldly.

"You do it then. You spend enough time there as it is."

I glared. "This is no way to run the downstairs. You need to whip the next person who refuses work."

"If I told them you said that, you'd be dead." He snapped at me. "Just because you're her personal slave doesn't mean you have power over the rest of us. You don't even remember what it's like to be one of us."

I did not understand him. I was nothing but one of them, subject to the same demands, to even more irrational whims. Just because I wasn't subservient to him, he thought I was an other. But I had always been an other there. They had always rejected me in one way or another, for a stupid inconsequential reason, like my language, when they had no other, (not that who I let use my body was of any more importance).

"I was never one of you. You never let me be one of you. And I remember what it was like in Moscow. It's better here. It's better for all of us." I shook my head and walked towards the cleaning cupboards to get supplies. "Why do you struggle after freedom?" I muttered to myself. "None of us are free."

I didn't want to believe what she had said. I didn't want to use her words, to include both mutants and humans in the "us," but I couldn't help but feel that she was right. We were all in chains forged by societal expectations. And there was no way out save death.

There had been such a backlash regarding the word slavery prior to the mutant revolution, and it had made people think of it as an enormity, when all it was was an institution formed by society, like banks. The mutants were thrilled by the taboo of it, but when it came down to the function, it was just another economic transaction.

It seemed to me that the more importance we bestow upon something the more we tend to disbelieve its contemporaneous existence. We aren't able to believe that other people think differently than us, even when it's so obvious that they do, even when we used to think that way ourselves.

For me, I could not let myself believe that I thought the same way as my mistress did. That was the enormity, the impossibility. And that was what made us unable to attempt communication. We both knew that there really was no way for us to understand each other, if there even was something there to understand, so we didn't try. _I_ didn't try.

The mold that clung to the grout was stubborn and frustrating. I scrubbed for hours, hot water, rough cloth, bleach stinging my fingers. I just wanted to get it _done_, but I was angry, at Aaron for not doing his job, at JJ for cringing away from Kurt. She had been blatantly rude to him the last time they met, and he had taken it unquestioningly. I was almost angry at Erik Magnus at that moment. What use is your mutant utopia if your citizens still expect to be ridiculed and insulted? Could his empire truly be called a paradise for mutants, or merely an oligarchy of the strong?

I was angry at myself, for a hundred things, for wanting Emma, for challenging her, for stupidly trying to force people to understand that a wrong committed by a society as a whole is not changed by a single instance of violence, for being afraid of what would have to happen to truly alter a society through violence, for knowing, through Kurt, that it would never truly change for the better.

I was angry at Emma for never doing anything for herself, and I was fighting with that wall until it glistened, and it still wasn't good enough.

Sweat dripped off my forehead, and I was almost finished, when I heard an odd hiss, and then suddenly I was drenched by the twin showerheads (one on each side). The water was icy cold and my clothes were soaked. I dropped the cloth into the tub and turned slowly around.

My mistress was standing in the doorway, laughing at me. All the anger I had been directing at the mold on the grout suddenly had a new target. I was suffused with fury, and I leapt out of the bathtub and charged her. (God knows what I would have done had I met her there.) She turned and fled.

I ran after her, dodging fleetly around the obstacles she put in my path. She ducked into her office and tried to shut the door but I slammed into it, forcing it open, and knocked her over with it. I tripped over her feet and fell on top of her.

I froze there for a moment. My soaking clothes were dampening hers, and she was breathing hard under me, still grinning like a hyena. It was nothing like the nights I came to her, full light, no script, no power, and I wanted her so much more than I ever had. I was pinning her arms to the floor, and I leaned in, ready to kiss her (roughly, because that was what I wanted, to punish her for this), and a bare hairsbreadth away I stopped.

I had never kissed her, not her mouth, not her face. It was never explicit, but I knew it couldn't happen, it wasn't allowed. It was a line that we couldn't cross, not without changing everything.

I hurriedly stood up, pulling away from her, and fled back to the bathroom. She sat up, tugging her wet shirt absently away from her body, and watched me as I packed up my equipment and left. I hissed my mantras, trying to build that wickerwork that Kurt had been teaching me, desperate to keep her out of my mind.

I couldn't let her see what I was thinking. In a way I wished I had learned a technique to keep myself from seeing what I was thinking. It made my stomach twist and my chest ache.

* * *

Perhaps I was more sensitive to it after she had played that trick on me, or perhaps she was merely watching me more often, but I felt her eyes on me often during the day, when I was just going about my normal chores of cleaning or serving. She seemed to be drawn to the places I was working. She would even come into the kitchen to complain or interfere or get something to drink if I was there. The mutant servants clearly noticed and started to give me curious looks. The only place she still never came was the downstairs.

It was the library where we always seemed to speak, a place where no one else came besides me with my dust cloth and her with her reading. She didn't pretend to have any ulterior motive in being there, just leaned against the doorframe and watched me.

Finally I couldn't bear her eyes anymore and turned around to face her.

"What is it?"

She frowned, turning away petulantly, but then glanced back, unhappy but intent. "You want me, right?" she asked, roughly. "That's what you meant, isn't it? When you… You want me."

Sometimes it was so obvious that she was only sixteen, trying so hard to place something so complex, so impenetrable, in terms she could comprehend. I could do no better.

I nodded weakly.

It was less of a defeat than I had expected. It was only a physical need; it wasn't admitting how I had felt when I had awoken after the first night in her bed.

"Okay," she said, awkwardly, and turned to go. Then she paused and glanced back at me. I knew what she wanted, what she meant, but she said it anyway. "Tonight?"

I nodded again. I would be there.

I wished she hadn't asked.

* * *

But that night she made it easy for me, as easy as it could ever be. We followed the script, with all its built in awkwardness and bland, unromantic, passionless eroticism. Then she curled into my back, burrowing her face into the back of my neck. Her hands moved around me, brushing against my breasts as if asking permission, and when I did not react, she curled her palms around them, feeling their weight in her hands. Her fingers brushed my nipples and I couldn't keep my body from stiffening. She laughed into my shoulder, and bolder, rolled them between finger and thumb.

Just in the way she touched my body it seemed clear that she liked it. I found her attraction for me pleasurable, enough to make it easy for her to slide her fingers into me and touch me until I came with a short gasp in her arms. She would often whisper to me afterwards, nothings, just her irritations at Court, lazy daydreams, dirty things, but her tone was always very self-satisfied.

Eventually I found this amusing rather than annoying.

I grew used to this state of affairs, comfortable with her hands on me, even if I never expected it. My wanting her was something I had admitted to, but I had an obligation to serve her, she had none such to serve me. I wondered if I would ever be able to ask for it, to tell her to do it, to fuck me, and expect her to obey, regardless of her own inclination.

I wondered if that was ever possible if there was no obligation. I wondered if she ever asked herself the reverse. Would I ever disobey her? Would I be willing if there was not obligation? I asked myself the same questions.

* * *

In the free time I did not spend with Kurt, I attempted to mend my relationship with Jennifer. She had found other companions amongst the slaves, and they were clearly uncomfortable around me. They did not reject me outright, but there was a tension there. And as always, I seemed to be prone to saying the wrong thing. JJ was used to my opinions about work, about finding meaning in the fulfillment of your duties. But her new companions were accustomed to complaining about the requirements of their state of bondage. I would nod and ignore most things as long as they were expressing their opinions, but often I would speak to correct a factual error before I thought about whether it was a good idea.

Working intimately with the butler and cook had made me very familiar with the workings of the house. If a slave was jealous of the lighter duties of a mutant servant, I could often bring evidence that their duties were in fact not any lighter, and they did not have the structure of the downstairs to rely on providing their meals and necessaries. They were uncomfortable with listening to me, but it was hard to argue with bland facts.

It was particularly difficult, for as always, there was the stirring of revolution. If I spoke up when the vitriol against Emma became too fierce, I was ridiculed. I was the mistress' slut. I sympathized with the woman whose bed I warmed. Some of the young men complained that they were never called to her bed. But their complaints were mere bragging about their masculine prowess. They still never touched me, and looked at me with something like disgust, as if they could see mutant fingerprints on my body.

I berated my mistress often in my head. I had a long list of faults and disappointments about her character, but although I could say them to myself, I could not bear to hear them out of anyone else's mouth. It seemed like an odd sort of possessiveness, but perhaps it was just fear. My complaints were complacent. I knew too well that there was nothing I could do to change her. But their words were backed by an ideological passion that spoke to me of blood. Perhaps I thought that if they did not say the words they could not work themselves up to the point of violence.

The rumors that spread through the downstairs were secret and quiet, but they spoke of rebellion. In other parts of the Empire, slaves had risen up and killed their masters. They were then all executed, but the rumors carried the hope of power, the promise of possible success. The stories made me sick. A whole household dead, for what? But if I said anything like that even JJ looked at me oddly.

JJ sat down next to me once and held my hand, asking me why I felt this misplaced loyalty. Didn't I believe that this state of affairs was wrong? Shouldn't we take vengeance for the murder of our parents by the sword?

I didn't believe that mutants deserved to rule, but I didn't believe in bloody revolution either. An idea may be a grand thing, but it is another person on the end of your sword, in the sights of your gun, and as the uprisings and bombings that occurred at infrequent intervals through the capital showed, a violent action provokes a violent response.

But many actions, violent or not, provoke a violent response.

* * *


	15. Chapter 15

15: Vengeance

Aaron was still displeased with me for what I had said about the grout, and when he had no other responsibilities for me, he would assign me to work teams. Being on a team meant I was theoretically subordinate to the leader, but it became clear that I was merely on the outside. The leader would make his least favorite team member give me my task, while he would speak in rough whispers to another.

It was the whispers and the eyes that made me uncomfortable. When they looked at me in silent disgust it was one thing, but now they seemed to be evaluating me, and although I did my work, I tried not to say incendiary things, I knew I would eventually fail. I had always failed in their eyes.

When I spoke with Kurt (my reduced free time interfered with our lessons, but we managed to find a few moments to talk) I could see them watching me and shaking their heads. I wanted to smack them with their own ignorance. Emma was one thing, hate the one who owns you, who directs your life, who has the ability to kill you with a thought, and would do so if she thought it was worth the bother. But Kurt did not deserve their hatred.

I needed his friendship. There was something worrying JJ, I could tell, but she would not confide in me. She cried sometimes at night, but she would violently resist any comfort or even a direct order to explain.

The tension downstairs seemed to increase day by day. The fear they had had after the incident that had been instigated by my whipping had faded and was replaced by hatred and anger. I felt that it would only take a single incident to set them off.

And then that incident occurred.

* * *

I had been assigned to the dining service, and charged with cleaning the rug while the others set the table and polished the silver. It had been somewhat awkward, because JJ was assigned to the same service and was not speaking to me.

And then Emma came home early. It was only an hour or so before her usual arrival time, but the other slaves hated to be blindsided by her presence. And they particularly hated her coming into a room where they were working. But she had developed the habit of looking for me and sauntered into the dining room as if this was something completely normal.

Everyone froze. I shot her a dark look. She shouldn't be here. I was uncertain if she read my mind, but she seemed to laugh at my accusatory expression. She was just passing through, heading towards the far door, she seemed to say with her body.

I was near the far door and I rolled my eyes at her nonchalant attitude. She laughed silently at my expression. And then she reached me, I was certain she was moving past me and towards the door, when suddenly she was there, at my side, and I looked up, already shocked, and she pressed her lips to mine.

She kissed me absently, as if she had forgotten that she wasn't supposed to. It was barely a kiss, just a moment long, an afterthought, but it was enough.

JJ dropped the tray of silverware she was carrying. It crashed jarringly on the floor. Emma glanced up and considered the surprise on everyone's faces. Then she looked at me. I was too stunned to move. Heat suffused my face and I couldn't tell whether it was with humiliation or arousal. The tops of her cheeks started to flush and she touched my arm. _Later_, she said, pushing it right into my head, and then turned and strode out, attempting to regain some of her confident carriage.

Everyone saw. Everyone knew that I had crossed those lines, and everyone hated me again.

Then they cornered me in the boiler room.

* * *

It was Cyrus and two other men, one bearing a heavy bag of soil. He came up behind me and swung it, hitting me in the backs of my knees and causing me to collapse. Then he brought it down on my back, knocking the wind out of me.

Then he stepped back and they waited for me to recover and get to my feet.

"She'll kill you for this," I hissed, still not thinking before I spoke.

Cyrus smiled. He stepped towards me, his body flush against mine, his thumb brushing across my cheek. "Do you really think so? Do you think if you don't come the next time she calls, she'll come looking for her slut?"

I swallowed hard. "Are you going to kill me?"

"That seems like a waste to me," he purred and glanced back at the man with the bag. "Doesn't it to you?"

He smirked and nodded.

"We just want you to scream when she touches you."

"How can you not be afraid of what she'll do to you?"

"Because she won't get a chance. When she finally remembers you and thinks to look down here, she'll be dead the moment she sets foot on the stairs. We're waiting."

"What?"

"She took _everything_ from me. She took away my dignity, and now I'm going to get it back." He palmed my breasts, groping them roughly. "I wonder how long it will take her to remember you. Perhaps we'll lock you in here, keep you for our own use, until you starve."

I lashed out at him, more nails and shock than force, but I scratched his face deeply enough to make it bleed. He tore the bag of soil out of the other man's hand and swung it into my stomach, the force slamming me back against the wall.

I cried out in my mind for Emma, but I was no telepath, and I was trapped and isolated in my own mind.

Cyrus brought the bag down overhand, towards my neck and I attempted to block it with my arm. The blow nearly wrenched my shoulder from its socket. I fell to my hands and knees, begging silently for someone to help me.

And then with a sound like a small explosion, Kurt appeared in a cloud of blue smoke. "Ah…" he examined the scene with bewilderment. "Emily… my lady sent me to look for you."

"The rat! Get him!"

Cyrus pulled an ugly weapon from his belt, a long jagged blade like that of a machete, and lunged for him. There was hardly any room to dodge in the cramped boiler room, and I couldn't let him be hurt. Though half prone I managed to jerk forward and wrap my arms around Cyrus' knees, bringing us both to the floor.

"You bitch!" One of the other men was on my back, grabbing my hair and jerking my head up, the edge of a knife sliding across my throat. I spared one thought to wonder where on earth they had gotten these weapons, and another to face the immediacy of my death. I would die there. I wouldn't be raped at least, a small comfort, but I would die.

Suddenly a blue pointed tail wrapped around the knife and the man's wrist and jerked it away from my throat. I rose up, shoving the man off of me, and reached out, catching Kurt's proffered hand.

And with a bang we disappeared.

* * *

We reappeared in the library, I stumbled away from Kurt, shocked and motion-sick, and fell into Emma who caught me like it was a surprise.

I told them quickly about the threats, about the plans, and Kurt quickly left and he and the other footmen put the entire downstairs into lockdown.

I had to tell the story again to Mr. Cage, Emma pacing along the edges of the room, and then things started happening with a speed I could barely comprehend.

The downstairs was cleared, the weapons caches taken away and destroyed. The slaves were all locked in the cafeteria and any found outside of it were killed on sight. When the entire downstairs had been ripped apart, walls torn down, flooring torn up, people's personal possessions burnt, the interviews began.

I watched them. Not by choice, but my mistress never gave me permission to leave.

If they were resistant they were drugged, given a sedative to make them compliant, and Kurt and Jessica would bring them into the room. Then my mistress would break open their mind and discover their knowledge of the plot, their degree of support for it, and their ability to be broken.

JJ cried. She had just known enough to be afraid, and she had known it was a threat to me, but felt helpless in the face of everyone's determination.

The ringleaders were separated from the followers, and the few who had not been involved, due to some complications in their thoughts, whether a dislike of violence, or a familial link to mutants which they had hidden among their fellows, were spared.

The followers were sold.

The ringleaders were executed.

I watched the executions from a high balcony, near where Emma stood, also watching, her eyes hard and cold.

It wasn't until they put the bag on Cyrus' head and turned him to face the wall that I realized I had become exactly what Irina told me I would.

I had done it without doubt, without hesitation. My own life had been in danger, but I had known that for long enough and done nothing about it. When Emma's life had been threatened, I had chosen to send them to their deaths.

Was I protecting the greater part over the majority? I could not say that, for there were so few left here, even if less than half had actually been killed.

I had chosen to protect my mistress alone, but my rationale was simple. My fate was tied to hers. It was by none of my doing, nor of hers. I was always an outcast from my own kind, and as there was no one else willing to open her arms to me, I had to protect the only thing I had left.

* * *


	16. Chapter 16

16: Mercy

While they cleaned the blood up in the courtyard and began reconstructing the downstairs, my mistress left to stay at her summerhouse. I was told to go with her. It wasn't as if I could refuse.

I sat in the back of the car as we drove into the mountains, arms wrapped around my knees, watching the city fade away in the trees and vines. The bloodstains were still visible before my eyes. I clutched my letter of marque and watched the skies for sentinels, wondering if I managed to throw it away, would they come for us, would they destroy us. I wished for justice in a world that lacked it. Not human justice, nor mutant justice, I didn't believe either of those existed, but something beyond that. Whether it was divinity or fate or cruel coincidence, I needed some evidence that I would be punished here and now for what I had done. But the only recriminations were in my own mind, and I knew, too well, that such pain would fade the moment I forgot to lacerate myself with regret.

I forgot as we pulled into the compound. It was beautiful there, a small building surrounded by jungle, with hot vivid blooms, and a cool still pool fed by a waterfall. It was paradise, and there was nowhere I belonged less. The servants generally ignored me. They could run things on their own here. There was no need for a liaison to the slaves when there were none. Kurt had stayed behind to help with the reconstruction. He had promised to keep Jennifer safe. The other servants assumed I had been brought for one purpose alone. I was not even given a place to sleep. But if not called for, I would _not_ intrude into my mistress' presence. I did my best to stay out of the way, to remain invisible.

The library was small, but private, and none of the servants ever entered it, so I spent the first night on the sofa in there. I spent much of the next few days there, reading. I hadn't had the opportunity to do so before, not for years, not since I had become a slave, and I was out of practice.

At first I was afraid to touch anything, so I would only read what was out, marking the places with my finger and paging though carefully, doing my best to leave no trace. It was an odd collection of works, some new histories of the mutant era, others old philosophical texts.

There were many by members of the Frankfurt School, which were made even more beautiful by the way they continued to write, pursue their goals, when they were fleeing or hiding from persecution and violence. How many others had made choices like I had? How many had turned against their own to save themselves? But what they had done was try so desperately to understand what had made their world turn against them, the lies people told, the beliefs that they clung to in the face of insurmountable evidence. The mutants had taken them as their heroes, as models of how live under oppression. But now, after the revolution, they had taken on the role of the oppressor, and their histories were chilling evidence of the way a story could recreate the truth.

I was reading an account of the massacre in Louisiana, where small cadres of mutants had wiped out an entire regiment by surrounding them with wooden palisades, spraying them with highly flammable substances, and burning them to death. I wondered if that was where Jennifer's father had died. It was celebrated as a great tactical success, a miracle of mutants with disparate powers working together against overwhelming odds. Now it was a holiday. There had been so much death, vile and ugly and irrational. It hadn't stopped, would _never_ stop, and I was trying not to be sick when I felt someone watching me. Emma was standing in the doorway, looking at me, an unreadable expression on her face.

I dropped the book as if it were on fire and shoved it away from me, then ducked my head. But she just walked in and pulled a particular book off a high shelf. She tossed it at me. "Here," she said. "You might like this better."

Then she selected another and left.

The book was entitled _Captain Blood_. It seemed to be a tale about pirates and adventures, and I hoped it would be meaningless, but interesting enough to keep my mind absorbed. I needed something relaxing. But the very first chapter told the story of a young idealistic doctor being sold into slavery because he was foolish enough to believe his duty as a doctor was above politics, and in the humanity of a Christian nation.

It was the story of a man who lost his ideals, and found them again in his mistress' imagined disapproval. It was about becoming a slave, a slave who fell in love with his mistress. And even when he escaped, to become a pirate, the ultimate freedom, without country, without morals, he still was bound by this love. And when he found the fantasy to be false, he lost, not only his inclination to be good, but his hope. And without hope, one cannot even counterfeit freedom.

I could not bring myself to stop reading.

He was more proud than I, and yet I could not help my tears as I neared the end. What a fantasy, to choose honor over violence, to gain a reprieve, be given power and respect, and to be allowed to choose mercy.

It was well imagined, and the difficulty of choosing mercy, the weakness of a man's character was accurately described. Accurately… how would I know? I had never, would never, choose mercy if I saw a risk in it. A dead man never took revenge.

* * *

She called for me that night.

I couldn't _see_ her anymore, that was the trouble. When I looked at her, frowning at me sternly from her perch, cross-legged on her bed, as I hovered in the doorway, unable to bring myself to cross the threshold, all I could see was her bland impassive expression as people were murdered in front of her, at her command. They had wanted to kill her, tried to, imagined it, had done their utmost to brutalize and murder me. But if I felt so little, I was certain that she felt less. I blamed her for my own lack of mercy, my inhumane desire for vengeance.

"Come _here_," she snapped, frustrated with my hesitance.

I came towards her, stood immobile, waiting for her next command. Her expression stiffened as she noticed my resistance. She slid forward, letting her feet drop off the edge of the bed.

"Get down."

I knelt. She grabbed my hair, jerking me forward, and I bit, sinking my teeth into the soft flesh of her thigh. She shoved me in response, backhanding me sharply across the face.

I knelt unmoved, as expressionless as I could make myself, tasting the iron of blood in my mouth. I thought about what she had said about none of us being free. I wondered if I was a person to her, who was allowed to have feelings, opinions, moods. I didn't feel like a person. She treated me like a loyal dog, but I acted like a dog. I didn't know if she could really interact with someone else as if they were a person, but for myself, I wasn't able to speak, I couldn't express my own feelings. I couldn't do anything, not even tell her, "No. Not tonight. I can't touch you when my hands are soaked in their blood. I can't pretend to be your lover when I finally know what it means to be your slave." I was more useless than she.

"Fine." My mistress dropped back on her bed, bringing her knees up, and rubbing the small mark I had made on her leg. "Whatever. Just get out."

I didn't want to go. I realized that unhappily. I couldn't sit on my feelings heavily enough to acquiesce to touching her, but I didn't want to be tossed out either. I didn't want to spend another night alone. I sat there hating myself, until she gave me a furious look. "_Go away!_"

I slept on the floor in the hall outside of her door.

* * *

She tripped over me on her way out that morning, then scowled, and jerked me to my feet. "Come on."

I followed her ashamedly out to the waterfall pool. I sat on the edge, near the deep still water, watching, while she stripped off to swim. She dove in, apathetic to my presence, and started swimming laps across the length of the pool. The light hit her bare pale skin when it surfaced as she moved. The splashing from the waterfall muffled the noise of her motion and around me the morning grew warm quickly.

Finishing what seemed like exercise, she paddled over to me, and watched me back. She looked calmer than usual. Her eyes took on the color of the water, glinting like blue chips of a sapphire in her face. Her hair had darkened to a soft honey brown. She seemed to consider me. I met her eyes, but impassively, giving her nothing. Then she grabbed my ankle and dragged me in.

I couldn't swim. I sank to the bottom, pushing against the slippery rocks to try and surface. There was a moment of air and I tried to breathe, but was going down again, and sucked in water that burned my throat. Floundering and coughing, half drowned, I somehow found my arms around her neck, and clung to her. She held me up, easily. I gasped, recovering myself, and finally I probed about with my feet until they touched. I realized that I could stand on the bottom and the water only brushed against my shoulders.

Shocked and cold and wet, my hair dripping water in my eyes, my heart still fluttering from panic, I stared at her, as she laughed at me, and I couldn't help thinking about the one ill-considered kiss that had brought all this to a head. Maybe it was only to shut her mocking mouth, but I pulled up, twisting my fingers in her tangled wet hair, and kissed her, roughly.

Her grip dug deeply into the backs of my arms and she didn't push me away. She kissed back, pressing against me. Her hands moved under the water to close on my waist, sliding up under my billowing shirt. I just cupped the back of her head and kissed her harder. She opened her mouth to me and I took it, took everything that she was giving.

This wasn't us. This didn't feel anything like us. I hated myself so much already that I didn't even remember I was supposed to hate myself for this. I bit down on her lower lip and her hands slid down my trousers, cupping my ass and pulling my hips into hers. I took the opportunity to touch her, touch everything I could. I wasn't gentle, but neither was she, and the cold water soothed any bruises we might have left behind.

We had sex there, rough simple sex, just hard grips and fingers pressing inside, and then moved up to collapse exhausted on the hot golden sand. I squirmed out of my stiff drenched clothing and spread it out to dry, before rolling back into the hollow made by my body. I lay still, staring up at the deep blue of the African sky, letting her fingers trace patterns on my skin with scratchy traces of sand.

"I don't know if I like who I am," I said, to no one.

"You are what you are," she said, as if it weren't a reply. But her fingers stilled, and there was nothing but silence after from us, though the air was full of birds crying.

* * *


End file.
